Nuit Blanche NYC 2011

Posted on October 2, 2011 by missalix

This time last year I took a trip to Boston, so I unfortunately missed the first annual Nuit Blanche in NYC (or more specifically, Greenpoint, Brooklyn). This year, however, I was in town and able to catch the event! I was pretty excited since all of the photos I’d seen from other cities’ Nuit Blanche nights (Paris, Berlin, Madrid, etc) looked really cool! It seemed like there were a ton of huge light installations and pretty neon lights and lots of things lighting or being lit up.

While there were some cool installations, the scale wasn’t quite as large as I had imagined. Admittedly I didn’t have as much time to spend there tonight as I would’ve liked to, but I feel like I was able to see just about everything that was outside in the hour or so I spent there. I’m not trying to knock it though, it was still fun and a good excuse to be outside on the first chilly night of fall. There were some cool pieces, my favorite being this bike that had different images projected upon it:

and it even projected artist Olek’s knitted pattern onto it, like many of her randomly knitted bikes around the city (and the shopping cart from the Crest Hardware show in my last post!)

and also this really cool eyeball that would look around that was projected onto a water tower:

and another more ominous photo of the water tower eye:

this blue blob was also really pretty, it made me think of a summer glowing sky with fireflies for lights

The red things in the photo below were like tin cans on a wire that went across to the people outside of the gate and you could talk to them while it lit up your face red, with the cool neon sculptures behind it:

Other installations of note that I didn’t take photos of were projected images of what looked like people crawling up the side of the building which was really cool, you can probably search for a video of it on YouTube (same for the images projected onto the previously mentioned bicycle). There was also a “PEEP” booth that had slide viewers of different random photographs (I’m guessing by the same artist? I’m not sure). Some of the photos were kinda random, like a shot of a cat about to jump off a table, but some were really nice like a haunted looking photo of a forest fire or some interior shots of abandoned buildings. There were some other art installations that featured photographs or videos, but nothing that captured my attention. Maybe there is more emphasis on the NY Nuit Blanche of just art in general and less focus on cool looking lights. Either way, I’d still be excited to check it out next year and see what’s new, and hopefully I’ll have more than an hour to spend to be able to explore!