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Live Arts - Open Air by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Presented by Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe

September 20-October 14, 2012

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Imagine walking along on a balmy evening in late September, and you’re looking up the Ben Franklin Parkway. You speak into your phone and twenty-four robotic searchlights—placed along a half-mile stretch of the Parkway—move to the sound of your voice, interpreting your inflections into motion and transforming the city’s skyline. You stop speaking (or singing or humming or rapping) and the lights continue to move, controlled now by other speakers collaborating with you from up and down the Parkway.

Famous for creating interactive installations on intimate and city-wide scales, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer underlines the connective, poetic uses of technologies originally developed for largely military and surveillance purposes. In the sky over the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, he enabled thousands of individuals to pre-design 200,000 watts worth of lights for twenty seconds at a time. In Open Air he brings his distinctly personal aesthetic to Philly and empowers you to animate your skyline. Using the custom-made mobile app, “Philly Open Air”, your voice brings these enormous three-dimensional formations to life.

In short: immense made intimate, robotic searchlights, listening in, outdoors on the Parkway.

Eakins Oval Information Center: 24th Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway, across from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Smartphones will be available for loan.

Sister Cities Park Information Outpost: 18th Street and Logan Square.

Both locations will broadcast the voices of participants, and have seating areas for watching the lights. Information center hours: 7:30pm–11pm.

Recommended for all ages.

A schedule of programs and nightly events for Open Air is at associationforpublicart.org/open-air