Michael J. O’Rourke: New York Mural: #2, for SIGGRAPH

  • ©,

Artist(s):


Title:


    New York Mural: #2, for SIGGRAPH

Exhibition:


Creation Year:


    2001

Medium:


    Interactive installation - printed tiles, pre-recorded sound, and live video

Size:


    6.5 feet x 15 feet

Category:


Artist Statement:


    This mural is derived from a design originally developed as a proposal for the City of New York. It was modified and adjusted specifically for the SIGGRAPH site.

    The imagery of the mural tries to capture the energy, diversity, and vitality of humanity, specifically as seen and experienced in New York City. Images of people rushing about their daily business, people at rest, people of different races, different ages, different social strata. Images of our buildings, the environments we create, our monuments. Images of our laughter, our socializing, our solitary quite moments. Images of nature’s – and our – ephemeral beauty. Images of the vastness and smallness of our universe, and of us.

    The rectangles of the mural echo both the historically rectangular canvases of painting and the more recent rectangles of video and film. The overlapping of the rectangles echoes the floating windows of our computer screens.

    Combined with the photographic images are hand-drawn drawings. These different styles of imagery, and the images themselves, mix and intermingle to form a new whole. With digital imaging, the borders between categories of imagery, between image-making techniques, collapse.

    In addition to the static imagery, there are also electronic elements embedded within the mural. A video screen displays images of pedestrians passing by the mural. Their imagery becomes part of the mural imagery. The mural is about them and about us. At another location, sound emanates softly from behind the mural wall. If we listen closely, we hear the sound of different people reading poetry, each in their own native language.

    The mural is constructed as a grid of printed tiles. These tiles echo both the thousands of years of mosaic tiled imagery across cultures, and the pixels of today’s digital image-making techniques.