PUBLIC ART AND WORLD TRADE CENTER

Our World Views residency in the World Trade Center gave many artists the chance to develop public art projects for the Center and other sites:

• Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda’s work on a proposal for a bioluminescent light sculpture to be placed atop the World Trade Center inspired them to develop the Tribute in Light memorial after the destruction of the towers.


• Shelley Eshkar used his residency to develop Pedestrian, a public art project installed this spring at Rockefeller Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem and Eyebeam, where visitors could interact with projections of computer-generated people who sit, push, run and move about, through a combination of motion-capture and complex crowd-simulation software developed for the piece.

In addition, Orpheus Descending, by Paul Pfeiffer, a former World Views resident, was installed at the Trade Center. The video artwork captured the 10-week life cycle of a flock of chickens as they hatched from their eggs and developed in an organic, free-range environment. This prerecorded video image played in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, above the steady flow of pedestrian traffic. Orpheus Descending was a project of the Public Art Fund, commissioned through In the Public Realm, a program of site-specific proposals and projects by New York artists.