Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York

A free contemporary art festival will transform an industrial stretch of the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, waterfront into a hive for the generation of art, spectacle, ideas, and community on Saturday, October 1, 2011—beginning at sundown in conjunction with concurrent nuit blanche festivals in Paris, Br... Read more

A free contemporary art festival will transform an industrial stretch of the Greenpoint, Brooklyn, waterfront into a hive for the generation of art, spectacle, ideas, and community on Saturday, October 1, 2011—beginning at sundown in conjunction with concurrent nuit blanche festivals in Paris, Brussels, and Toronto.

“We’re interested in how temporary installations of contemporary art can encourage communities to re-imagine public space and create a forum for civic dialogue. Whether monumentally immersive or quietly engrossing—we hope to introduce thousands of New Yorker’s to artwork that is not only relevant to contemporary art practice, but actively engages with the space it inhabits. Bring to Light is specifically exploring the present and future possibilities of the NY Waterfront. For one night each year, Bring to Light brings the museum to the warehouse, the gallery to the factory façade, the grand monument to the smallest neighborhood corner, in the European tradition of the nuit blanche,” says Ethan Vogt, Executive Director of Nuit Blanche New York (NBNY).

NBNY is an art organization known to many New Yorkers for its May 7th, 2011 collaboration with the New Museum and Audemars Piguet as part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City. Vogt and NBNY creative director, Ken Farmer, will present on a panel at the New Museum on October 8, 2011 entitled Illuminating the City: Site Specific Art as Urban Activator.

Richard Serra, Jeremy Blake, Rita Ackermann, and Chakaia Booker are among the more than 50 artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, and musicians from around the world represented by video and light projections, installations, performances, digital and sound pieces. Varying greatly in process and viewpoint, these range from site-specific works freshly conceived for the occasion, like video artist Alex Villar’s Splitting Image, an ode to an epic ferry commute set to play on the East River Ferry, or the world premiere of The Perception of Moving Targets, the latest project from filmmaker Weston Currie to be scored live by electric-ambient musician Grouper, to the groundbreaking 1993 video Soft Sell by Diller & Scofidio. The East River Ferry itself will also extend its service late into the night for festival goers traveling between Manhattan and the new India Street Greenpoint Ferry pier.

In its second year in Greenpoint, the festival is part a locally organized, international network of nighttime celebrations of contemporary art that originated in Paris a decade ago. Its unique setting on the New York Waterfront is essential to the mission of NBNY to expand Bring to Light to a citywide annual waterfront event.
Says NBNY Creative Director Ken Farmer: “We are interested in how something as ephemeral as Bring to Light can also leave a lasting impact on a neighborhood like Greenpoint. We want visitors and residents alike to reconsider the role of contemporary art in transforming public spaces—and how events like Bring to Light can contribute to the overall quality of life. On a small scale we want to encourage residents to enjoy local parks in a new way. On a large scale we want to further the dialogue about waterfront access for all New Yorkers.”
Festival highlights include:

Asalto by Madrid-based artist Daniel Canogar: Via interactive projection and green screen technology, visitors crawling horizontally across a green screen are projected en masse as a surge of climbers up the facade of a nearby factory.

In the Woods by Swiss artist Camille Scherrer: Set between a warehouse and playground, this `sidewalk fairy tale’ alters viewers’ shadows so that human forms metamorphasize into the whimsical reflections of mythical forest creatures.

Youth Poetry Performance: presented by Hive Learning Network NYC, Urban Word, and City Lore’s POEMobile, A month-long series of workshops in collaboration with NBNY explores an innovative model for youth empowerment, focused on projection mapping and the power of the written word. Culminates in a performance of original works by NYC teen poets, accompanied by large-scale projections of their words, creating both a social and a physical community forum for talented new voices.

Sidus Link, by NYU Interactive Technology Program’s Stepan Boltalin and Ezer Longinus: A mobile application that allows people to add virtual stars to the sky using GPS triangulation, principles of Augmented Reality and 3D graphics. Crowd-sourced virtual constellations created by festival visitors shine brighter on local smartphones as more participants ‘add stars’ over Manhattan.

So…I Was at a Party Last Night, by British designers Roland Ellis and Andrea Cuius: a light and sound reactive installation with hanging tungsten lamps with varying and intricately designed filaments, suspended from the interior of a lush furniture design warehouse, creating a luminous canopy over a grand piano. The sound of half a dozen musical performances programmed throughout the night reacts to dim and brighten the lights in real time.

Related Programming

A free public lecture Monday, September 26th, and workshop Tuesday the 27th will investigate the rapidly growing art and technology of projection mapping. Leading projection mappers GarageCUBE, a Geneva based design label behind the groundbreaking Mad Mapper software will lead an exploration of this innovative new public art form. The Tuesday workshop will feature hands-on demonstrations of the basics of projection mapping and the Mad Mapper software.

Illuminating the City: Site Specific Art As Urban Activator, New Museum, 235 Bowery
Saturday, October 8, 2011
A panel discussion with Bring to Light Executive Director Ethan Vogt, Creative Director, Ken Farmer, select Bring to Light participating artists, and Eva Franch, Director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture and Guggenheim curator David van der Leer. Reception in the New Museum Sky Room to follow.

General Information

Getting there:
The East River Ferry runs regular service to the India Street Pier in Greenpoint from Manhattan, Queens and several locations in Brooklyn, and will extend its regular service between 34th Street in Manhattan to the India Street Pier in Greenpoint. By train, G Train to Greenpoint Ave. Walk (2min) down Greenpoint Ave. to the site. L Train to Bedford Ave. Walk (15min) to water then North on Kent, which becomes Franklin, to reach festival site. By bike, free bicycle parking at Franklin St. and Milton St. will be provided to riders.

About NBNY
NBNY produces large-scale media art events for civic, cultural and corporate partners, engaging creative communities and making temporary interventions to enhance physical and social space.
Most recently, in conjunction with the New Museum and Audemars Piguet, Nuit Blanche New York produced the outdoor contemporary art event Flash:Light for the Festival of Ideas for The New City. Flash:Light included “Let Us Make Cake” a 174 foot site-specific video projection on the iconic facade of the New Museum featuring contributions by renowned artists Marilyn Minter and Vito Acconci, the world premiere of Civilization 3D by the artist Marco Brambilla—an engrossing video installation recreating Dante’s Devine Comedy with hundreds of images from contemporary film presented in the monumental interior of St Patrick’s Old Cathedral — and a dense pedestrian corridor of light-based public art installations along Mulberry Street in historic Little Italy.

For more information on NBNY visit: www.nbnyprojects.com

For more information about Bring to Light : Nuit Blanche New York visit www.bringtolightnyc.org