Madison Square Park Gets Lit Up

For the next few months, visitors to NYC’s Madison Square Park will be privy to a new kind of light show as part of the park’s public art program. The site-specific installation from new media artist Jim Campbell is set to premier tomorrow, October 21st, and run throughout the fall and winter through the end of February. The installation will feature three new works by Campbell situated throughout the park, a series of light sculptures meant to highlight aspects of the human experience among the city’s urban landscape.

Each work is evocative of a different aspect of city life. Scattered Light, for instance, is a 3D matrix composed of nearly 2,000 LED lights are programmed via computer to create ghostly images meant to give the illusion of figures moving across the park’s central Oval Lawn. Broken Window, located near the park’s main entrance on 23rd St and Fifth Ave., is an array of LEDs encased in a glass-brick wall that will create illuminated images reflecting the movements of the surrounding city. The third piece, Voices in the Subway Station, is composed of 18 glass tablets lit from below by flickering LEDs that are programmed to pulse at various intervals creating a “visual symphony of light timed to rhythmic patterns reflective of the eclectic sounds of urban subway systems.”

Photo Caption: Jim Campbell's Scattered Light (2010) in Madison Square Park
Photo Credit: Courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy/Copyright James Ewing