New York's High Line hosts a whole program of art commissions, exhibitions, performances, videos and more. One of its most recent additions is a light sculpture on a pedestrian bridge. Prismatic_NYC comprises rotating prisms of LEDs that move and change based on the weather.
The installation was designed by Hyphen-Labs in collaboration with Interior Architects. Interior initially contacted Hyphen with a view to creating a kinetic installation that could help to connect the interior of a pedestrian bridge to the outside environment.
"Being on a bridge over a major New York City Avenue is a rare opportunity and the installation helps to really celebrate that moment," Hyphen's Bill Galusha told us. "Hundreds of people will walk under it every day."
Inspired by Trivision billboards, where prismatic columns rotate to show different advertisements, the installation comprises 66 rotating prisms attached horizontally to the ceiling and turned by brushless motors. Each prism contains a number of LED lights, with over 40,000 used overall.
The installation pulls in data from publicly available sources across the web, including weather information. This data is then used to inform the movements and color changes of the prisms and LEDs. Inputs include temperature, wind, precipitation, ozone information, seasons and holidays, sunrises and sunsets, tidal movements and lunar and celestial events.
Hyphen says that the ways in which the data affects the installation are quite abstract, but, to give a clearer idea, explains that cloud cover, wind speed, humidity and accumulation or intensity of precipitation, affect the amplitude, frequency, speed, and position of the sculpture. The simplest example is the use of wind speed to determine the speed with which the prisms rotate.
The creative and design process for the Prismatic_NYC installation is said to have started almost a year ago. It will be in place for the next 5 years.
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