With apologies to Journey, the lights may not go down in the City by the Bay for quite a while. Not if Leo Villareal, an artist known for his illuminated installations in major museums and at Burning Man, has anything to do about it.
If permits clear and completion funds are raised, Villareal's latest project will soon cover the west span of the Bay Bridge with 25,000 individually programmable nodes of white LED light.
Called The Bay Lights, the project will debut in late 2012 or early 2013, in time to celebrate the completion of the new east span.
Artistic renderings show the cables of the bridge covered in a frieze of moving lights that resemble effervescence or searching headlights, depending on their direction. The piece will be visible from dusk to dawn from San Francisco and points north, but will be invisible to motorists driving on the bridge.
"My pieces tend to mirror the activity around them," said Villareal, who added that the abstract patterns to be shown on the West Span will be inspired by water, traffic, and local weather patterns.
The artist programmed his early light-based works with microcontrollers, and now uses custom software that he develops with a team of programmers. The Bay Lights installation, he said, will most likely be housed on a single Mac Mini in a secure room, running the software on Windows with Boot Camp.
Prominent supporters including the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Mayor Ed Lee are on board with the project -- not least because The Bay Lights is expected to bring up to $100 million in tourism revenue to the Bay Area.
The abstract patterns will be inspired by water, traffic, and local weather patterns.To round up the final $3 million of the $8 million in funds needed to bring the privately-capitalized work to life, Bay Lights organizers have reached out to Silicon Valley. In a statement, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder and CEO of Wordpress and a major supporter, called the project "an investment in our community."
"Once you realize the positive economic and aesthetic impact The Bay Lights will have on the area," Mullenweg said, "making the initial pledge was a no-brainer."
In addition, angel investor Ron Conway and tech investor Adam Gross are helping to spearhead the Tech Challenge, a social media-driven campaign that will seek donations from the rest of us through Twitter and Facebook.
Villareal, who lived in California from 1994 to 1997 (he interned at Interval Research, a Palo Alto technology incubator that introduced him to technologies he later adapted for his art), described the Bay Area as "a place I love very much." He has been visiting frequently this year, for meetings, talks, and to observe the site. While The Bay Lights are live, he will return periodically to observe the work and tweak the display on the bridge, adjusting the brightness and pacing of the patterns until the piece and its surroundings are perfectly in sync.
Sounds elegant. But once the nodes are up, won't it be possible to program anything onto the Bridge: Giants scores, a real-time game of Pong, or the lyrics to a certain Journey tune?
"With a grid of LEDs, we'd certainly be able to," said Villareal. "But my hope is to create something that really augments what's there. It's an artwork, not a light show. It's not about 'Hey, look at this thing!' My goal is for it to feel right."
Photo courtesy of Illuminate the Arts
