Madison Square Park has been host to over thirty contemporary outdoor art exhibitions in the last decade, only some of which incorporated giant inflatable bananas. The latest project coming to the park is Whiteout by artist Erwin Redl, which will cover the park in a luminous white carpet of LED lights over the Oval Lawn. And yes, it looks exactly like Tesla's lightbulb experiment from The Prestige.
The project, which will be on display from November 16th through April 15th, 2018, is a newly commissioned piece by Redl, who is best known for creating spectacular light projects on the facades of buildings. In a 2014 interview with Vice, Redl explained that he is among a small spectrum of people who "work with tiny sequencing of lights. I mean there’s other people in my field whose work I admire, but it's on the other spectrum. They're much faster, much faster spaced, and more related to like a night club aesthetic. And I see myself much more in an almost land art context than an artificial, strictly-technological context."
According to a press release, Whiteout is comprised of "hundreds of transparent white spheres, each embedded with a discrete, white LED light and suspended from a square grid of steel poles and cabling. The orbs will be opportunistic, gently swaying with the wind currents from their positions of two feet above the ground plane. The white LEDs are animated in large-scale patterns superimposing a virtual movement on top of the kinetic movement of the spheres. The sequence of light will be an incandescent treatment of urban public space across the dark seasons of the late fall and winter."
For more info about the ongoing Mad. Sq. Art projects and programming, check their website here.
