Nearly 2,000 LED Scattered lights, the new site-specific public art installation by pioneering new media artist Jim Campbell has been presented at Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Scattered Light features three installations of orchestrated light incorporating elements of computer programming and high-technology for a public art installation which literally lights up Madison Square Park this fall and winter.
These lights will remain on view through February 28, 2011, as part of the Conservancy's Mad. Sq. Art program.
Featuring three new major public art commissions, Jim Campbell's Scattered Light blankets Madison Square Park's Oval Lawn with a 3-D matrix of nearly 2,000 LED lights featuring moving images.
For the largest of the three commissions, which shares the name Scattered Light with the exhibition, nearly 2,000 LED lights, encased in standard light-bulb casings, creates a vibrant light grid suspended within a support structure spanning 20 feet high and 80 feet wide, across the center of Madison Square Park's Oval Lawn.
The LED bulbs, engineered to flicker scattered light at the command of computer programming, creates the illusion of figurative images that explore and reflect the human experience amidst the urban landscape. These figures appear to move across the park’s central Oval Lawn. As one travels around the work, the vantage point alters and the light figures begin to abstract, blurring the boundaries between image and object. Both abstract and representational, sculptural and image based, Scattered Light illuminates and activates Madison Square Park with Campbell’s light-based sculptural approach to the concept of contemporary image-making as pixilation in a manner that is at once elegantly simple and quintessentially contemporary.
Jim Campbell, comments, "I am thrilled to have the opportunity to present my newest and largest scaled light-based installation inside Madison Square Park. Works of art created from light work better in nature, and the grand scale of this installation will be enhanced by the interaction between the thousands of visitors to the park each evening."