Seoungho Cho: Buoy

Every night through 30 June, South Korean artist Seoungho Cho's visually stunning moving-image work Buoy flows across fourteen of Times Square's iconic outdoor video signs — more than 36 screens and 5,900 square metres of screen space between 42nd and 47 Streets —simultaneously. Just before midnight, Cho's luminous tribute to the desert turns Times Square into an immersive virtual canyon, surrounding the viewer with a Western landscape captured in motion, light, and digital transformation. Buoy, presented by Electronic Arts Intermix, is part of Times Square Moment: A Digital Gallery, the ongoing public video project organized and presented by the Times Square Advertising Coalition and Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance.

Seoungho Cho's Buoy fills the famous square with the golden, mysterious landscape of Death Valley, California. The installation reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, which was once the floor of a vast sea, now traversed by sight-seeing tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho's camera, vertical "strata" pattern the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho's composition. Cho accumulated his Death Valley footage over several years; the vertical patterning further represents the collapse of this footage into what appears to be a continuous drive through the desert.

The movement in Buoy travels among the different-sized video screens in Times Square, mirroring the sophisticated rectangular spatial changes Cho created through choreographed overlapping video windows.

Each month, for Times Square Moment: A Digital Gallery, a new work will be screened every day in a countdown to midnight. The participating sign holders have committed to synchronizing their daily programs in order to open up an unparalleled space for moving image art in one of the most dynamic media landscapes in the world.

Through 30 June 2012
Seoungho Cho: Buoy
Times Square, New York
23:57 to 24:00