Light Art & The Street, Personal Projection

In Ben Rubin’s class entitled, The Anecdotal History of Sound and Light, we spent a good deal of time discussing the history of human-made light in public spaces.  Disenchanted Night by Wolfgang Schivelbusch was helpful fuel for the illuminating discussion and many of us considered for the first time what life must have been like without electricity to blanket cities with light.

As a result of those discussion, and my own hyper-awareness of details in the urban setting, I began examining the lights of NYC and found very little by way of what one might call art.  Street lights have been around for longer than electricity and stand for very pragmatic reasons.  Similarly, lights on storefronts and apartment buildings maintain a level of safety.  Then there are traffic signals, headlights, and all the light that emanates from transportation.  Advertising and storefront makes up the remaining bulk of urban light, especially if you happen to be within a half mile of Times Square.  All of these relatively new forms of light carry an inherent pragmatism that never before lived in darkness: information.  Equal to the street lamp that illuminates the dark sidewalk, the glowing golden arches of McDonald’s lights the way.  Our nightly urban experience is an inundation of info-lighting, much of it begging us to part with our dollars, very little of it inspiring us to live better lives, or become more self aware as individuals, or suggesting that we be more tolerant, etc.  All of these are aims that rest in the ideology of much street art, however subtle it may be.

Consequently, during the day time, the city is full of graffiti and signs of personal expression, but it all disappears at night, unless it has been carefully placed under a street light in which case the light itself is not connected to the expression.  Personal projection is a means of wrestling information light out of the hands of the advertisers and bringing our attention to more mind-expanding expressions, standing as new pillars to walk between under the night sky.

The rich history of light art has roots that extend far back before electricity.  Surely fire twirling and other sorts of flammable installations dazzled crowds.  Fireworks are another example, and stretch back to 7th Century China according to Wikipedia.  In the past few years some experiments with light art in public have begun to sprout up.  Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) does a lot with light and even has a project called “Projection Bombing.”  However, the equipment required (pictured at left) is both expensive and not exactly mobile.

Clearly, the imagery that the GRL presents is inspirational and will inform public projection for decades to come, but the scale of their work presents an obstacle to the general public when it comes to thinking about more personal forms of expression.  Compare the equipment above to what is now available, and will soon be on every smart phone:

As I set out to experiment with personal projection, I wanted to begin with imagery of familiar street art but illuminated by successful light art all within a single composition.  I quickly realized that these are not necessarily the expressions I wanted to project all over the city, but they seemed like a fine place to start.

In fact, the reason I took this class can be traced to a single a ha moment with a James Turrell installation.  My wife and I were driving across the country in a moving van, and everything we owned was parked in front of the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh while we went inside.  Wading into the darkness of the second Turrell room, so to speak, there was what seemed to be a projection of a 2D purple rectangle on the opposite wall.  As I got closer, I the flat dimensionality of the wall opened up before me and I realized it was actually a 3D space, indented in the wall and lit to look two dimensional.  I immediately realized the power of this moment and its loose connection to my expanding world, the moving van my vehicle, and New York City my destination.  Along with a dozen other artists, James Turrell was added to the list of those that had, in a sense, blown my mind.  I’d known Turrell’s work for years, but not experienced that “expansion moment,” and I began to think about light art in an entirely new way, and now find myself giving a great deal of attention to light art that I come into contact with.  And, again, it fueled my interest in this class.

Thinking about public projection, it made sense to start with a set of collages composed of light art and street art.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that these were simply test patterns for future endeavors, but the conceptual combinations at play were both fitting for my exploratory tasks, and I had not seen street art and light art working together before.  Bringing Robert Irwin together with Swoon followed by the idea of projecting them in public darkness just seemed fitting.  Or, watching Olafur Eliasson’s sun rise under the curtain held up by Banksy’s maid, and to set this on the brick wall of a stairwell buried in darkness, it just made sense as perfect for the initial tests.

On that note, the idea to simply re-create successful light art pieces in public via personal projection is one that will inevitably materialize for decades to come.  The appropriation of light art is essentially an untapped database, and I predict personal projection will invite this world into the urban darkness one DIY installation at a time.  Light artists go to great lengths in creating perfect conditions for site-specific installations but the cultural significance in appropriating such conceptual substance will add to the rich fabric of the public discourse, subconscious or otherwise.  By subconscious of course I’m referring to a collective of public expression that can be described as unsanctioned street art.  Street art is entering the main stream consciousness more and more every day, especially with blogs that post the highly clever, colorful, entertaining art.  One such site is called WoosterCollective.com.  It’s safe to say WoosterCollective.com is one of the most popular street art sites in the world, if not the most.  It is the joint effort of the husband and wife team Marc and Sara Schiller.  They started the blog several years ago as a result of causal photography of the street art in their neighborhood.  This phenomenon quickly caught on and soon they were receiving emails from all over the world asking to post content.  Consequently, this site has become a curatorial effort that maintains an inherent responsibility to its users to publish content that is at once entertaining and also pushes the world of possibilities forward.  This example is relevant here simply because personal projection in public space could have a short life span, and important sites like WoosterCollective.com will be the broadcasters of the public expression.  I stand by an assertion I made a couple years ago that (vastly) more street art is seen online than on the street.  This prompted me to start a project called Web Street, which collects Photoshopped street art.  Again, this idea weaves its way into thinking about personal projection in the public since the content can be created first on the computer and then projected anywhere (much like wheat pastes, using stencils, or other object-based materials that find a home in the public setting).  Personal expression that happens in public and then finds a home online maintains a genuine public essence.  Each piece is a kind of ready-made set of instructions in and of itself as something repeatable, or at the very least easily appropriated to fit into a personal aesthetic of choice.  Again, the basis of these experiments, and my own personal research and experiential meanderings in the darkness is ultimately about new manifestations of light in public.

The best, and one of the only examples I had to go on was a piece called Wildlife by Karolina Sobecka, in which a running tiger is projected onto dark buildings from a moving car.  Many people whom I spoke with about the idea of personal projection in public referenced this piece, and aside form the less mobile projection projects by GRL, there continues to be a vast space that smart phone users will move into in the years ahead, once projectors arrive on board the phone.

Along with my own ideas about personal projection, I became more educated on public light art in general.  Jim Campbell’s installation at Madison Square Park went up during this class.  Here is some footage I took just recently.  Also, Ben Rubin presented his own work and various proposals, and I discovered some other great examples of public light art, but, all of them stand as examples of city-sanctioned, well-planned, and expensive works that inevitably alienate street artists. Holiday lights and glowing jewelry fall into the same categories of expression as light entertainment, diametric to most street art.

Personal projection is something that is indeed beginning to enter the public consciousness.  One example is a recent show at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery called BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer.  This is quickly turning into a series of events taking place all over the world, the next being Portland, Oregon on December 19, 2010.  Galleries have proven to be experimentation sites for the public consciousness for decades and as the digital world continues to permeate the art world, the seeds of new thinking are sewn in the white box.  Inevitably, this activity of beaming will erupt outside into a space that continues to be lit in ever-evolving ways.

It did not take long for me to figure out that I was going to need darkness if I was going to be able to use my pocket projector in a way that scaled up the images.  As GRL pointed out, expensive projectors are needed for the best results.  But I was convinced that if I simply put in enough time wandering around at night I’d be able to find some dark spots.  This led to several discussions about searching for darkness, and two classmates and I realized that it would be an interesting and valuable idea to create a darkness map.  So, Genevieve Hoffman, Rune Madsen and myself are in the process of doing just that, and the darkness map is another component to this final project for the class.  Samples of the map will be posted to our class blog, and then the map will be ready for viewing at the ITP Winter Show.  A goal for that project is also to create a set of instructions so that the map can be filled in by people from anywhere else in the world, it will love at www.DarknessMap.com.  Here is a single image that shows what one side of one street will look like.  This is Waverly Place between University and Mercer.

My projection experiments were valuable and I learned from many mistakes.  I had to learn and re-learn the importance of darkness, and I spent several hours over the course of many late nights wandering the streets of Manhattan, projecting my test patterns.  Often these wanderings were fruitless insofar that they resulted in video content that merely documented my process.  For example, I took footage of the fountain at Lincoln Center, and then created several files of the fountain using different video filters, and then projected that all over the city.  Here is a brief video that shares this set of experiments.  This documentation (of which there is much more) stands as time spent thinking and learning about how personal projection can enhance the public space at night.

Finally, I am including a another video piece of the experiments I have done so far.  This five minute clip illustrates many of the things I discussed earlier in this paper, and also shows the current trajectory.  Keep in mind that these are my initial iterations and currently stand as introductory gestures meant to invite an interested public to begin thinking about a near future wherein much of the populace will be carrying these tools in their pockets.  Again, this project is continuing, the next steps are to consider smaller scale, site specific pieces that will draw-in passersby for a hopeful, illuminated moment as they move through the darkness.

Increasingly, light is utilized for both its luminosity but also its ability to contain and project information.  In cities covered with pragmatic uses of light, mostly for issues of safety and advertising, we will now see the blank canvas of darkness rich with personal expression, adding to the ever-evolving urban landscape, and beyond.