At Bring to Light, this projection kept an eye on the crowd: CCTV/Creative Control TV by Marcos Zotes-Lopez (via thegreenpointers).

This past Saturday, October 1, marked the second annual Nuit Blanche / Bring to Light New York. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Nuit Blanche festival, which was founded in Paris and has since spread to a number of cities around the World. Nuit Blanche is a free nighttime contemporary arts event. The installations are site-specific and designed to draw attention to their urban context. This year’s Bright to Light featured fifty-nine projects.

More after the jump.

For one evening, Bring to Light takes over a stretch of the Greenpoint waterfront, bringing people and activity to a portion of the neighborhood that is primarily industrial and often creepily quiet at night. Over the past year, NBNY Executive Director Ethan Vogt explained, the festival organizers have worked tirelessly with the City to grant visitors access to previously closed-off portions of the waterfront. For the weekend of the festival, NBNY bought liability insurance. While this sounds like the bereaucratic nightmare that it no doubt is, it also demonstrates the organizers’ commitment to making accessible and rethinking public space.

The impact of the festival is not only intended to be felt by the visitors. NBNY Creative Director Ken Farmer explained:

“We are interested in how something as ephemeral as Bring to Light can also leave a lasting impact on a neighborhood like Greenpoint. We want  visitors and residents alike to reconsider… how events like Bring to Light can contribute to the overall quality of life.”

Jason Peters’ Structural Light, which weaves through a handball court fence (author’s image).

NBNY has taken pains to demonstrate their interest in the gentrifying changing neighborhood that hosts the festival. This is not at all a negative thing, but if this is a stated interest of the group, it’s also crucial that they acknowledge who within this community this festival caters to and cultivates. Executive Director Ethan Vogt eagerly pointed out new bars, cafes, and stores that had opened adjacent to the festival site since last year’s Bring to Light; each establishment had a central-casting hipster population inside. There is nothing wrong with hipsters, but let’s not dis-acknowledge the reality of their status as not-quite-longterm residents.

Peep Show by Ugly Art Room (via flickr user bluepinkphoto).

Leaving gentrification politics aside (which one must do on occasion), Bring to Light is like a long, powerful hallucination of urban contextual public art. Highlights included: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Soft Sell, which premiered in Times Square in 1993; Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Veteran’s Flame Greenpoint, a projection in the damp but somehow cozy back of a neighborhood bar of a single flame accompanying the voices of American and Polish Veterans; and, Daniel Canogar’s Asalto, in which images of visitors crawling across a green screen were projected on the facade of a huge abandoned factory

by Andrea Marpillero-Colomina

posted in Events

tagged Events, new york city, nuit blanche

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