Colorshift

Colorshift is an urban-scaled art project made by inputting an algorithmic sequence of alternating colors into the FreshDirect video billboard in New York City. At the time, 2007, it was the largest video billboard in the country. It was one of the first projects of the studio.

location

Long Island City, New York

year

2012

Photography by

Stefan Hagen

Video by

Scott Kuzio

Billboard

FreshDirect

Colorshift briefly took over the billboard during the winter nights of 2007. The illuminations from Colorshift were recorded from different points of the city simultaneously and presented in a gallery exhibition through a 3-channel, high-definition video as well as large format photographs.

The following photographs are views of Long Island City neighborhoods effected by the glow of the billboard under Colorshift.

The Color Shift algorithm dances around the color wheel, staying on a 25 degree color mixture for 30 seconds before transitioning 150 degrees across the wheel to another analogous mixture. Terraswarm (aka Aranda\Lasch) wrote an algorithm to generate a sequence of color fields that replaced the billboard’s regular advertising feed. On a series of evenings in the months of February and March 2007 the billboard was illuminated, transforming the neighborhood around it.

The Fresh Direct Billboard was 165 feet tall with 65′ x 90′ (5,850 square feet) of video signage. Over 30 million vehicles go through the Midtown Tunnel each year carrying an average of 1.4 people resulting in 40 million impressions. Because of its massive size and brightness, a law was passed to limit the size of any future video billboard in New York City. As a result, the billboard, now demolished, is as urban anomaly.

“It’s a kind of creative mis-direction of urban light pollution – a post-Duchampian optical relief in technicolor, throbbing through a dozen spectra across the roofs and walls of New York City.”
Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG