Art with a Light Touch Presented at the Waterfront This Week
Now through Saturday, the Battery Park City Authority is partnering with Illuminations.NYC, a non-profit organization that produces free, light-inspired art installations, to present a Spring Showcase on Belvedere Plaza (the elevated plaza between North Cove Marina and the World Financial Center ferry terminal). Billed as an “immersive multi-sensory light art festival,” the event will use the work of seven avant-garde light artists, long with a roster of jugglers, stilt walkers, fire circus artists, and DJs to transform the space into an outdoor art gallery, performance space, and music venue. This free family event features inventive pieces that incorporate technologies like projection mapping, interactive video art, and UV light art.
Among the artists is Daniel Rautenbach, who will present his 2022 Masters Thesis project for NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, “Cui Bono”—a phrase from Cicero suggesting that culpability for a misdeed can be discerned by who benefits from it. This interactive light installation consists of immersive LED panels that react to the presence of those who approach—responding to how much space they take up and how much movement they exhibit. In this way, the piece invites users to visualize and spatially experience how organisms enter and influence an ecosystem.
Another virtuoso whose work is featured at the Illuminations Spring Showcase is Young-Min Choi, a South Korean-born, Brooklyn-based multimedia artist who works with visual coding languages, three-dimensional renders, and digital fabrication to create interactive experiences and artifacts that alter the viewer’s perception through embodied experience. Ms. Choi’s “Cloud Mirror” reflects where the viewer was three seconds in the past. As the participant’s breathing gets deeper and longer, their “reflection” (generated using point cloud data to produce an artistic interpretation of their body as seen through a depth camera) moves closer to the present. In this way, “Cloud Mirror” invites participants observe and communicate with past versions of themselves through body movements.
The Illuminations Spring Showcase is on view tonight through this Saturday, May 6, from 7:30pm to 10:30pm each evening (open until 11:30pm on Saturday). Admission is free, but registration is required.