Hasta La Gadget!

If you happen to be in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park (right next to the historic Flatiron Building) at night, you might catch a glimpse of artist, MIT grad, and self-described “nerd” Jim Campbell’s latest public art project “Scattered Light.”

The work is a three-dimensional, 80ft x 16 x 16 array of 1,600 hanging light bulbs. Up close, the project presents itself as a swarm of shimmying lights. But when taken in
from afar, the viewer is able to make out shadowy figures walking across the
project (the actual video used in the piece consists of footage of people
walking through NYC’s Grand Central Station).

Every bulb in the project is fitted with an LED which is hooked into a central computer and syncs the whole project together. Each bulb acts as a pixel in, what is essentially, a huge television screen that has exploded into three-dimensional space.

The work appears with two other
multimedia works by Campell in the park: “Broken Window,” which is a
large wall of glass tubes that also plays with the concept of
low-resolution images, and “Voices in the Subway Station” which embeds
20 glass panels in the park lawn that light up in synch with audio
recorded inside a New York City subway station.

The works will be
on display through February 2011.

Video after the jump.

via
switched