Marcos Zotes’s “CCTV/Creative Control” will look down on “Nuit Blanche” visitors from the Milton St. water tower (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Multiple locations throughout Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Saturday, October 1, free, 6:00 pm – 12 midnight
www.bringtolightnyc.org
Greenpoint will shine bright tonight for “Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York,” the second annual multimedia festival featuring site-specific projections and performance art in the gentrifying neighborhood. Begun ten years ago in Paris and now held in numerous cities around the world, “Nuit Blanche” celebrates the community in which it takes place; in the case of Greenpoint, an industrial zone that has seen an influx of artists (and hip bars, restaurants, and music clubs) over the last few years, “Nuit Blanche” seeks to build interest in expanding and opening up more of the waterfront to public use. In fact, executive director Ethan Vogt and director of operations Tom Peyton got the city to allow access, just for one night, to several areas that are usually closed to the public. “Bring to Light” consists of more than fifty installations scattered throughout Greenpoint, from a trio of Richard Serra videos from the 1960s and ’70s to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s “Veterans Flame Greenpoint” (footage of a flame flickering to Afghan war stories told by Polish and English-language veterans), from Jeremy Blake’s Winchester Trilogy to Raphaele Shirley’s light-and-water-based “Light Cloud on a Bender,” from Sean Boggs’s slide sequence “Passerby” to Jeff Desom’s panoramic restaging of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Among the interactive performances are Rita Ackermann’s “A Backwards Walking Flash Mob,” in which one hundred participants will be filmed walking backward; Daniel Canogar’s “Asalto,” in which people are filmed crawling across a green screen, the results of which will be projected onto a tall building across the street, as if dozens of men, women, and children are climbing up the facade toward the heavens; and Ellis & Cuius’s “The Company,” in which visitors can walk under and around an arch of dangling Tungsten lightbulbs that react to sound and movement (and will host live performances in the space). If you take the East River Ferry from Thirty-fourth St., you’ll be greeted by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “Soft Sell,” a video of a large lipsticked mouth welcoming visitors to Greenpoint (and which was originally created for Times Square in 1993, just as it was about to undergo massive changes itself), and can later find Alex Villar’s “Splitting Image” in the park, about a commute on the ferry. And keep an eye out for Marcos Zotes’s “CCTV/Creative Control,” a projection of an enormous watching eye under the Milton St. water tower. There’s art just about everywhere you look, so grab a program, follow the map (or just walk around aimlessly), and enjoy what should be a fascinating and fun — and free — evening of unique and unusual art and architecture.