Artist Garson Yu shows how it’s done at his new multimedia public art installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Pier 57, 15th St. & the West Side Highway
Daily through June 16, free, 9:00 am – 7:00 pm
www.hudsonriverpark.org
t.i.n.y. slideshow
As part of the continuing transformation of Hudson River Park’s Pier 57, Garson Yu has installed the site-specific “T.I.N.Y. (The Interactive New York),” a participatory art project that uses shipping containers to create a unique trip through the sights and sounds of the city. A former New Yorker who was born in Hong Kong and is currently based in Los Angeles, Yu runs yU+co, an award-winning company that has designed titles for such films and television series as Life of Pi, 300, The Walking Dead, Watchmen, and Oz the Great and Powerful. For “T.I.N.Y.,” Yu collaborated with his son, Adrian, an NYU Cinema Studies student who shot video across the city, capturing speeding subway trains, midtown traffic, mobs of pedestrians, skateboarders, street musicians, birds, ballplayers, kids riding the swings in Coney Island, and waves on the beach. Those images are projected onto two rows of shipping containers, where they can be viewed from a third, center row of containers between them, set up to look like a subway car, with windows on either side. The accompanying soundtrack includes dogs barking, cars honking, kids screaming, and many other city noises. “Straphangers” can leave messages on the walls of the central row using colored chalk; in addition, they are encouraged to make sounds into microphones placed in colanders, the loudness and frequency affecting the projections’ speed and motion, even making them go backward, like memories flashing past. A sign by the entrance advises, “Shout Yell Holla Make Some Noise.” When we stopped by on June 1, a man kept going over to several of the microphones, hooting and hollering with abandon; it turned out that it was Yu himself, who was sticking around to check out how people were reacting to the piece and to set off a chain reaction, which worked, as various men, women, and children followed suit. Meanwhile, from up above, Yu’s friend Ik-Joong Kang’s white sculpture of a boy with binoculars sitting atop a raised shipping container keeps watch. “We are storytellers,” yU+co explains on its website. “T.I.N.Y.,” which also features a family-friendly Sound Hunt on weekends, invites people of all ages to be part of the ongoing tale.