The Wake, a virtual artwork in Times Square
i24NEWS ·
The 3 Minutes POP in the heart of Times Square, to discover "a very different work of art, both tangible and virtual." What first catches the eye is a giant structure of wood, metal and fiberglass: a ship's hull "with a faint air of Noah's Ark," 7 meters wide, 10 high and 18 long, inspired by the 19th-century warship USS Nightingale, whose animated figurehead takes the face of the star of the era, Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale." But the most surprising part is "what you cannot see with the naked eye": a whole section in augmented reality, to be experienced with an interactive mask or a smartphone app. The skeleton of the boat then turns into a real vessel, and you find yourself engulfed beneath the waves. For Stanislas Bulavin, the engineer and designer of the project, the goal is to make people think about global warming: "if the population doesn't change its behavior, what could happen at this spot on our planet?" One visitor says they had "the feeling of really being underwater," among boats that all end up disintegrating. The work is by conceptual artist Mel Chin, in collaboration with students from the University of North Carolina at Asheville for the graphic and digital side. "The Wake" dropped anchor all summer, until mid-September, at the corner of 47th Street and Broadway. David Benaym's 3 Minutes POP in Benjamin Petrover's “C'été l'info”, i24NEWS in French, July 23, 2018.