Like moths to a flame, New Yorkers are drawn this winter to Austrian musician-turned-artist Erwin Redl’s Whiteout installation on Madison Square Park’s central Oval Lawn. It’s the 35th exhibition since the Madison Square Park Conservancy began celebrating sculpture by living artists through free public art in 2004.
Redl, known for his dynamic light projects on building façades, takes his computer-controlled lighting process to new heights with Whiteout, which comprises two discrete steel rectangular structures that suspend 900 transparent white LED spheres. The polyurethane orbs float two feet above the ground and sway with the outdoor elements.
To make it come alive, he developed a computer-generated undulating light pattern, which illuminates the bulbs in waves of varying speeds and directions. The artist studied both composition and electronic music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, which he says inform his light installations in that “structural composition in music is time-based; visual artists did not think about time before the 1920s or so. I am always thinking about time and structures over time.”
Whiteout is a juxtaposition between the natural world and the man-made: “I wanted to expose the ephemeral movement of the wind, which is normally not visible except in the swaying of tree branches, and put emphasis on this invisible element by exposing the bulbs to this medium,” Redl explains. “I’m giving up control of this parameter of the design because, of course, you can’t control the wind.”
