May 12, 2008
Lighting to Unite @ National Cathedral
Swiss lighting artist Gerry Hofstetter brought his work to Washington National Cathedral over the weekend, as part of a celebration of the Cathedral’s centennial. Hofstetter projected his incredible artwork across the Cathedral for a piece titled Lighting to Unite. There were so many amazing captures of this event in our Flickr pool this morning, we just had to share them with you. Did you make it up to the Cathedral to see it for yourself?
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This really was a great (and very photogenic) event! Thanks for featuring some of out photos here.... :)
It looks like some of the links to flickr are swapped, though....
Stunning! Wish I could have seen it.
Man I'm sorry, I worked so hard on those, I think only two of them are wrong, fixing ASAP.
No worries, Sommer! :) Thanks for the quick fix...
Glad you liked the photos! Were you there, too?
Duuuuuude......look at those colors. You can totally taste them. And I can hear them singing to me. Far out man. Who's the Indian chief sitting next to me?
Was this a one-time thing, or will it become an annual tradition? I missed it, dammit!
Is it just me, or does the three-faced one look like a Colgate ad featuring Condi Rice?
I'm sorry, I have to object to the use of the phrase "incredible artwork" in this piece. I might instead choose "decorative light design". I have to say my expectations were raised by all the talk about how this was going to be art, so I was extremely disappointed to find out that no, there was no artistic merit in this.
Doesn't anybody else make the distinction between art and oooooohpreeeeeettty?
"I was extremely disappointed to find out that no, there was no artistic merit in this."
Whoops, hit send too quickly. I was going to make a snarky comment about someone having the audacity to attempt to set forth what has "artistic merit" and what does not...but I think I'll let my previous post's unexplained silence speak for me.
I was around Cleveland Park on Saturday night, and made a point to drive by the Cathedral on the way home. I was disappointed that the lights apparently are only on during scheduled show times, rather than being up all night the way we light the Washington Monument, Empire State Building, and other buildings. Having a show, then turning off the lights might have made a nice performance...but if they cycled different lighting all night, it would mesh well with the permanent nature of the monumental building. Plus, with all the funky gargoyles and grotesques, I think it would've been way cool if they'd made something of a spectacle independent of planned showtimes (as if the Cathedral is always serving as someone's mp3 visualizer:).
@indiecognition -- The show was scheduled until midnight each night. I don't think they could have run it all night, because from the looks of it, it required teams of people on each side of the building to manually run the projections.
i wish the lights were running for longer....
....could have seen them if i just wouldn't have driven out to pw county to try to see the cursed band.... :P
btw, i'm getting nothing if i try to click on anything but the first picture....dead links.
Manual projections? That makes this the best shadow puppetry ever!
This event was hugely disappointing. The musical program before the "light show" was too long and lasted too far after dark. The "light show" should have started as soon as the sunset, not after 9 PM. The "light show" was essentially a slide show. Granted, the slides were nice, but the presentation was extremely slow paced. There was nothing exciting about it. The artist would make pronouncements that bordered on absurd. He would also constanly readjust the slides once they were projected on the cathedral. It was if there wasn't much preparation and the show was being done by the seat of the pants. A lot of people started to leave soon after the presentation began.
@14thandYou: I guess my standard, if I were to reduce it as far as possible, is that there should be some meaning in what you're seeing, and I didn't get any out of this.
And no, I don't think it's audacious to define the concept of artistic merit. I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this particular case, or on my definition in general, but I'd be more interested to hear what your definition is, and why the Great Cathedral Overhead Projection Farce fits the bill, than I am in hearing you flatly deny that artistic merit is an invalid avenue for criticism.
I braved the rain sunday night and only caught a couple slides before the shut it down. A little disappointed, but I'm glad to see the cathedral and others put the work into making this happen.
This kind of large public art and creativity should be encouraged. DC needs it desperately to counterbalance all the crappy sponsored "chili fests" and "ethnic festivals" that are anything but.
When I went by on Friday night, they were only projecting stuff onto the eastern side of the Cathedral.
I went on Friday night, and I think they were having some technical problems. Some images stayed for a while, and others went too quickly. Also, a handful of images were repeated way too frequently.
Around 11 or so, they got it working properly, apparently, and it was really cool to see the show properly done. I just wish they'd had it working longer, so we could have seen more images.
I really hope they do something like this again. It was a great time.
~EEE~