OFF THE WALL: FIGMENT AND GREENWAY LIGHT UP CHINATOWN PARK

Glorious multicolored light projections, sculptures and towers turned Chinatown Park aglow this past Thursday night with five radiant installations curated by the interactive art organization, FIGMENT. The FIGMENT Lights Opening is part of the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway’s Winter Lights series illuminating Boston.

The event jump started with two avant-garde dance performances.

Originally fire spinners, the four dancers swirled their LED lights and flow wands. The spinner groups represented, included Grasshopper Fire Arts and Spiral Glyphics.

Five dancers from The Boston Conservatory performed an improvised routine, which at times felt like watching yoga poses turn into interpretive dance moves. Holding poses in clusters, their all black outfits decorated with glow sticks formed a moving light exhibit.

“Performing outside gave us a lot of inspiration,” said Liz Cappabianca, the dancer standing on the far right of this image.

The art installations at Chinatown Park included William Turville’s Fish Lumieres sculptures (pictured above); the Collaborative Electronic Mixed Media Institute’s The Blueway—light wands forming a river bed as well as Colorscape Fusion—towers projecting LED lights, Jim Salem’s Winter Fireflies—100 electric fireflies in a tree; and Ethan Kiermaier and Ricardo Delimas’ you-cue-are—large-scale images of different QR codes projected on a brick wall.

The QR codes are generated by tweets produced within a five-mile radius, and a viewer can scan the code using a smart phone, which will then decode back into the original twitter text.

This incorporation of social media into public art adds an interactive aspect to the you-cue-are installation that is only fitting in our hyper-technological world.

“The fact that this speech is encoded into a visual language accessible only through another technology adds another layer of involvement for the viewer. The piece is an exploration of our increasingly multi-layered relationship with advertising, messaging and public space,” said Kiermaier.

Kiermaier is in the process of projecting you-cue-are in the park for the next week. Most of the other art installations will be up until March 21. Overall, the Winter Lights series will probably draw more people to explore local parks.

“We are continuing on the theme of light and trying to activate parks at night,” said Katelyn Littlejohn, the Greenway’s Art and Communications Associate.