Chicago Public Schools at Art on The Mart 2023/Courtesy of Art on The Mart
When Art on The Mart launched in September 2018, Trib writer Steve Johnson asked a “really big-screen question”: “Is Chicago ready for video art?” After five strong years of experimenting and programming, Chicago is not only ready, but ready for more.
Standing 165 feet tall and 556 feet wide and with a projection area of the size of nearly two American football fields, Art on The Mart (AoTM) is an outdoor video-projection mapping project that commissions artists to create moving-image works of dazzling colors and atmospheric sound to be shown at the Chicago River Confluence. Projecting directly onto the south façade of the Merchandise Mart, the Art Deco building designed by Alfred P. Shaw and built by Marshall Field & Co. that was the largest in the world upon its completion in 1930, AoTM comes to life every evening after sundown from April to December, awing tens of thousands of people who promenade along the Riverwalk or gaze at it from a highrise window.
Since its inception, AoTM has collaborated with an impressive lineup of artists, including big names such as Diana Thater, Barbara Kruger, Charles Atlas and Nick Cave, as well as students of SAIC and Chicago Public Schools. Nonprofit organizations across Chicago are on the list, too, such as the Joffrey Ballet, Art of Life, After School Matters and the Adler Planetarium, co-presenting interdisciplinary moving-image programs on the façade. Each program typically runs for two to three months, with artist commissions and partner programs paired or staggered.
Artist selection has been overseen to date by Cynthia Noble, the founding executive director, along with a rotating advisory board composed of artists, curators, art professionals and art advocates. Last year, before celebrating its fifth anniversary in September, AoTM announced its first guest digital art curator, Switzerland’s Dr. Raphael Gygax, who is premiering his inaugural series this April with fresh and energetic projects by local and international artists and organizations.
Nora Turato, performance view, Basement Roma, Rome, 2021 Photo: Robert Apa, courtesy Basement Roma/CURA
Transdisciplinarity—how text, movement and visual art interact—and collaboration are hallmarks for Dr. Gygax’s curation for AoTM. “A transdisciplinary approach is very important to me,” he says. “The artists we select this year are all working on the edge of something else. Almost all the pieces we are showing are linked, in one way or another, to another art field.” Kicking off this year’s program is Croatian graphic designer and performance artist Nora Turato, known for doing lengthy, intense text-based performances. These performances are characterized as “pools,” which are thick volumes of intricately designed books that incorporate text fragments from a wide range of often uncredited sources, from pop culture to political statements. In a video interview with Art Basel, Turato, who is innately funny and cynical, waxed on about how she, working as a graphic designer, never considered becoming a performance artist. She then stunned the viewers with her humor: “There has been a canon of tall crazy women in my family, who have been doing precisely what I do, yelling on the streets and talking, but they have been locked up for it.”
According to Dr. Gygax, Turato’s sixth iteration of “pool,” or “pool 6,” which tackles concepts such as wellness and self-improvement, will be the source text to be edited into a bombarding text-based video for AoTM, nodding to the vernacular of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger but taking it to a next-generation level. Additionally, “pool 6” the performance, commissioned by Performa, will come to the Art Institute for a single afternoon on Saturday, April 13.
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Students, Analog, 2023. Courtesy of Art on The Mart
The history of typographic art has an intimate relationship with the industry of advertising. Applying bold typeface on attention-grabbing, slogan-like phrases is a powerful marketing element and has been appropriated by artists to subvert meaning or to use in social and cultural parodies. In this sense, it is particularly effective and meaningful, artistically, to deliver a text-based work through a medium that also flirts with advertising and publicizing powers: architectural video projection mapping.
The first case of known video mapping, albeit on a much smaller scale, dates to 1969, when the Haunted Mansion ride opened in Disneyland and featured white busts with videos of singing performers mapped onto them. Video mapping that turns building façades into monumental cinematic screens may seem confoundingly new and flashy, but can trace its lineage all the way back to architectural illumination that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, after the wave of electrification in metropolitan areas. Chicago, the birthplace of modern skyscrapers, was at the forefront of producing technologically innovative and aesthetic-defining architecture, and was also ahead in the game of architectural illumination. The McJunkin Building, built in 1923 and standing at the intersection of Wilson and Broadway was, according to architect and historian Dietrich Neumann, “the first permanently color-lighted building.” Influential early lighting engineers such as Walter D’Arcy Ryan, who oversaw lighting design for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934, and Bassett Jones, a now barely remembered designer and engineer who proposed a plan to illuminate the Tribune Tower, helped reshape the outlook of architecture at nightfall.
The other aspect to consider is the platform for advertising. The proliferation of handbill and poster advertising began in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States and evolved into more organized and regulated forms such as the billboard. Though the first digital billboards weren’t installed until the early 2000s, the conception of a media façade—a building exterior with an embedded messaging system—came about in the early twentieth century as architects’ solution to better control the plentitude of billboards while maintaining the aesthetic integrity of buildings, as architecture historian Craig Buckley writes in his article on the genealogy of this phenomenon.
Artistic projects popped up around 2010 that made it possible to map animation precisely onto an exterior surface of a building through projection, exemplified by the 2009 project “555 Kubik” by Urbanscreen that lit the façade of Hamburg Kunsthalle. The medium of building-projection-mapping won the hearts of advertisers as corporations in electronics, automobile and fashion industries have thrown millions of dollars toward creating spectacular, jaw-dropping light shows to promote their products. The dystopian cityscape rendered in “Blade Runner” in 1982 is an appropriate exaggeration of how advertisement—with the advent of technologies such as the digital billboard and projection mapping—has infiltrated our urban fabric saturated with images, moving and still.
Chicago Public Schools at Art on The Mart 2023/Courtesy of Art on The Mart
If illuminating a building began as a way of place-making, to imbue a building with a scintillating identity recognizable in the dark, the abundance of screens today has tilted the balance the other way, turning landmarks into non-places and transforming the experience of urban strolling into a composite frenzy of cinematic fragments. Artistic interventions that attempt to subvert such urban sprawls are not only costly but also require a lot of coordination to navigate between corporate interests. Every year, Expo Chicago’s billboard project “Override” places artworks on select digital billboards, welcoming curious audiences to catch a few seconds of art in between lengthy rotations of advertisements. Another example is Midnight Moment, the digital public art project that storms Times Square in New York City, which, despite its astonishing effort to coordinate ninety-two digital billboards owned by multiple companies, has only a precious few minutes of art before midnight.
This makes Art on The Mart a pretty miraculous project that distinguishes itself not only through its uncompromising dedication to public art, but also by the sheer fact that, with its multimillion-dollar price tag, it came together at all. Its host, The Merchandise Mart, which straddles two city blocks with 3.7 million square feet of office and commercial space, was famously owned by the Kennedy family for over half a century until it was sold in 1998 to Vornado Realty Trust, a multibillion-dollar company that is one of the biggest office landlords in New York City as well as still The Mart’s sole owner today. When Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011, the next phase of the Riverwalk beautification project was on his agenda. In October 2016, additional passages of the riverwalk were opened to the public, including the segment “The Jetty,” between Franklin/Orleans and Wells of the Lower Wacker Drive, located right across from The Mart. To harmonize with 2017’s programming, designated as the “Year of Public Art” by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), more art installations emerged along the Riverwalk including Candida Alvarez’s monumental paintings and the Floating Museum’s mobile exhibit “River Assembly” that served as prelude for the second Chicago Architecture Biennial. According to Noble, the former mayor connected with Vornado to discuss his vision for a lighting framework, and the latter decided to pioneer in illuminating the Chicago River through the first-of-its-kind video mapping project using The Mart façade as the platform. And Noble herself, thanks to her experience in arts and museum administration, cultural tourism and marketing, was brought on board to further this multilateral collaboration. AoTM came to fruition after a handshake between the City of Chicago and Vornado to establish this new media project—which Vornado paid for and promised to operate and maintain—with a provision that it stays entirely public for thirty years. In other words, no commercials, logos, branding or corporate messaging on the projected façade. Nothing but art.
The concept of collaboration not only runs through Dr. Gygax’s curatorial vision, exemplified by a unique partnership with the Poetry Foundation to present a commission between poet Natasha Trethewey and visual artist Bethany Collins this fall, but is also an accurate representation of AoTM itself; its journey is an experimental discovery of combining art and technology in a scale and permanency that had probably never been attempted before.
Cross-section of projection room/courtesy of Valerio Dewalt Train
Realizing a projection this big is no simple task. But once the notion was seeded, Bay Area creative studio and pioneer in large-scale projection mapping Obscura Digital was called in. They developed a plan that would use thirty-four professional Christie Boxer projectors, divided into groups, to cover The Mart’s façade in four overlapping slices. Each projector can deliver a brightness of 30,000 lumens and 6K resolution—more than enough to project for a commercial movie theater. Obscura also built proprietary software and servers that schedule and play the artists’ videos, which, according to Michael Pritchett, The Mart’s vice president of technology, can range from ten to a couple of hundred gigabytes in size. Artists use an After Effects template, created around the building’s blueprint (which leaves all the windows out), as their canvas. But Obscura was absorbed by another company, taking the proprietary business with it. “That was a challenge because, software-wise, we had to start all over again,” says Pritchett. Since Obscura left the scene in 2017, Florida-based creative technology firm Pure Dezign and Schaumburg-based audiovisual consultant AVI-SPL have been working with AoTM, providing on-site supervision and regular maintenance. With its office on the fourth floor in The Mart and its control booth across the river by the projectors, AoTM also works with AT&T, using segments of the company’s pre-existing cables that go under the river to create a private connection that allows for a secure internet connection between the two sites.
Diagram of projector racks/courtesy of Valerio Dewalt Train
Another technical challenge is the permanent installation of the projectors. With each device the size of a medium suitcase and weighing over 300 pounds, in order for the projection to work properly, the fleet needed to be shelved and encased in a nook at the Riverwalk, nesting just below Wacker Drive. “The thirty-year commitment,” as Noble says, “is also in part a land lease with the city for us to install the equipment.” Design group Valerio Dewalt Train was summoned to tackle the task of building an enclosure that not only securely bears the weight of equipment, but also allows for ventilation and regular maintenance. Since projectors get hot, let alone so many of them in one space, each projector gets individual ducts that blow hot air out of the space and into Lower Wacker. “The ventilation system uses filters, which are very similar to the kind in your furnace,” Pritchett says. In the beginning, the filters were changed often, but something was still clogging up the machines. “It turns out it was brake dust from the cars passing Lower Wacker, which are extremely fine particles, so we had to buy more expensive filters. That was an interesting lesson learned.” These days, during the winter months between January and the end of March, the projectors get an annual checkup and maintenance, from lens cleansing to recalibration.
Cinematic visuals would be incomplete without the crucial components of sound. Early followers of AoTM know that the project didn’t start with a full audiovisual package. “When we initially launched, we weren’t allowed to have sound. The city didn’t want to disturb the residents living nearby,” Pritchett says. Using a web-host application that allowed the audience to listen to the audio portion of the work via their phones quickly proved to be insufficient. “The experience was just lacking without sound in the environment,” Pritchett says. After the first year, and equipped with help from former DCASE commissioner Mark Kelly, a big advocate for this project, AoTM gained the city’s approval to install speakers only if sound could be contained within the Riverwalk as much as possible. “We worked with the company Audio Visual One to conduct site surveys and installed very directional speakers,” Pritchett says, “if you go up to Upper Wacker or cross the river, you can’t even really hear any sound.”
School of the Art Institute of Chicago Students, Analog, 2023. Courtesy of Art on The Mart
Public art creates environments, builds bridges for connections and signals the pulse of the city. Being one of the few public programs that could continue throughout the pandemic years thanks to its open-air nature, AoTM helped create a public sphere as people yearned for the return of interpersonal closeness. When asked how collaborations with certain other institutions came together, Noble recalls: “2020 was when we first realized that the façade could be another kind of stage. When all of Chicago’s stages were closed, together with the Joffrey Ballet, we were inspired to do a partnership and present a version of ‘The Nutcracker.’ It brought great cheer and inspiration to people in that incredibly difficult time.”
Another salient example is “Love Letters” by Chinese-born artist Yuge Zhou, which premiered at AoTM in the fall of 2022. A product of a collaborative team of a choreographer, dancers, computer animators and a sound artist, “Love Letters” portrays two urban dwellers as they dance through animated color blocks in close proximity to each other yet never making physical contact. “It was a very personal project for me, at a time when I couldn’t visit my family in China,” Zhou says. “This longing for reconnection is translated into the site-specificity of this work that uses The Mart’s exterior features as the starting point to design and animate the movements.”
Having recently been promoted to executive director of Vornado Arts, overseeing projects in Chicago and beyond, Noble has great ambition and vision for AoTM in the years to come: “What distinguishes Art on The Mart from other video-projection-mapping projects is that it is very humanistic and not so much just tech for tech’s sake,” Noble says, “but tech is always in service of people. The real long-term potential in this project—which it is already doing—is to convene people and to create this kind of social space that we’ve always needed. In the post-pandemic era, we know we need to come together and engage with work that can catalyze dialogue and amplify the voices of our times.”
Art on The Mart’s upcoming projection program features a commission by Nora Turato, on view nightly from April 12 to June 5, 2024 at 8:30pm.