Thursday, March 14, 2013
San Francisco’s Bay Bridge becomes a glowing network of Ethernet-enabled LEDs
Ars Technica: On Tuesday evening at 9pm local time, a 1.8 mile western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be transformed into a massive, two-year-long public art project called The Bay Lights.
Each night for the next two years, from dusk until 2am, the northern side of the bridge section between San Francisco and neighboring Treasure Island will display a dazzling array of 25,000 LEDs. It's an assortment of seemingly animated patterns, strung vertically on the bridge’s twisted steel cables.
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I commented on this project last time around, and since then I've been to SF to see for myself. I have to say for "blinky art" it's not bad, and some of the effects produced are fairly interesting. I especially liked a passing cloud motif that I saw a couple of times. The response seemed to be just what the city and the organizers hoped for: lots of people hanging around downtown later into the night. Like many smaller cities, San Francisco's downtown is mainly a financial and tourist district during the day, with not much going on at night. The Embarcadero, which is the waterfront strip running along the Bay Piers from McCovey Cove to Fort Mason, has undergone 30+ years of transformation beginning with the tearing down of the 101 overpass (if you've ever seen Bullit with Steve McQueen, the hotel he hides out in looks out on the old overpass), continuing with the building of the Giants baseball stadium and the spread of development all the way down into the industrial area known as the Dogpatch. This latest project and its privately raised price tag of 8 million dollars is a testament to the incredible influx of money that has transformed the Bay Area over the last few decades into something kind of great and kind of awful at the same time. The price of progress, no doubt, but it begs the question of what else that 8 million could have bought. If the city is going to truly benefit from all the tech and development money flying around, one hopes it can make something more of itself than a playground for yuppies and hipsters. I don't see this project as doing much to address the issues of homelessness, drug abuse, displacement of the working class, and myriad other ongoing problems that persist in the city and the nation at large. We shouldn't let any number of LED's arranged in so many limitless configurations distract us so completely from the real challenges we face as a society that we find ourselves tripping over them, literally, in the street. If San Francisco, arguably on of the most politically progressive cities in the U.S., can't find a way to turn success into something more substantial than some cool blinking lights, I wonder if it's possible.
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