By: Jacqueline Houton
Art is an action word at New American Public Art, a Somerville design-and-build firm whose tech-savvy makers view brick walls, public parks and vacant lots as blank canvases for interactive work. “Our mission is to make places creative,” says co-founder Bevan Weissman. “We have a lot of space in the public world that we just sort of walk by and don’t really pay notice to. So what we want to do is make installations that empower people to look at their environment in a new way.” Such projects include Your Big Face, which let visitors project their faces, Wizard of Oz style, onto a giant 3-D visage at the Illuminus festival at SoWa, and Culture Tap, whose kiosks played hyperlocal oral histories by day and light displays by night, activating with the tap of a Charlie Card. Says Weissman, “We want to make spaces where people are encouraged to be more friendly, be more social, and disrupt the normal expectations of ‘Don’t go out at night; don’t talk to people in public.’ ”
Weissman met co-founder Dan Sternof Beyer about five years ago at a New England Foundation for the Arts meeting, and they formally launched the company in 2014 after several years of collaboration. Now New American Public Art’s half-dozen members create installations not only for Boston, but for cities across the country, like Philadelphia, where they just finished working with artist Candy Chang on an interactive mural inspired by the I Ching, and Baltimore, where this spring’s inaugural Light City festival featured Blue Hour—one of Weissman’s favorite works. “The inspiration for the name and the theme of the project is the blue hour of astronomical origin: that magical hour either in the morning before the sun has risen or the evening after it has set,” he explains. “We wanted to create lights that echo that visual character and give people the power to make the sun rise or set with these lights depending on how they move through it. That was rich in meaning for us because it speaks to where we are right now with technology—is it the dawn of an exciting new era or is it this new scary time where we’re more isolated from each other?”
They’re hoping for the former, and one way New American Public Art supports that vision is by making most of their projects open-source so that others can recreate and rejigger them free of charge. “Technology has taken so many leaps recently, and part of that has been people opening up their designs,” Weissman says. “We view open source as the tide that lifts all boats, so we’re very happy and honored to be able to contribute to that community.”
Top Right Photo Credit: Bianca Mauro
Imagine That
By Improper Staff April 22, 2016
Sparking Creativity
By: Jacqueline Houton
Art is an action word at New American Public Art, a Somerville design-and-build firm whose tech-savvy makers view brick walls, public parks and vacant lots as blank canvases for interactive work. “Our mission is to make places creative,” says co-founder Bevan Weissman. “We have a lot of space in the public world that we just sort of walk by and don’t really pay notice to. So what we want to do is make installations that empower people to look at their environment in a new way.” Such projects include Your Big Face, which let visitors project their faces, Wizard of Oz style, onto a giant 3-D visage at the Illuminus festival at SoWa, and Culture Tap, whose kiosks played hyperlocal oral histories by day and light displays by night, activating with the tap of a Charlie Card. Says Weissman, “We want to make spaces where people are encouraged to be more friendly, be more social, and disrupt the normal expectations of ‘Don’t go out at night; don’t talk to people in public.’ ”
Weissman met co-founder Dan Sternof Beyer about five years ago at a New England Foundation for the Arts meeting, and they formally launched the company in 2014 after several years of collaboration. Now New American Public Art’s half-dozen members create installations not only for Boston, but for cities across the country, like Philadelphia, where they just finished working with artist Candy Chang on an interactive mural inspired by the I Ching, and Baltimore, where this spring’s inaugural Light City festival featured Blue Hour—one of Weissman’s favorite works. “The inspiration for the name and the theme of the project is the blue hour of astronomical origin: that magical hour either in the morning before the sun has risen or the evening after it has set,” he explains. “We wanted to create lights that echo that visual character and give people the power to make the sun rise or set with these lights depending on how they move through it. That was rich in meaning for us because it speaks to where we are right now with technology—is it the dawn of an exciting new era or is it this new scary time where we’re more isolated from each other?”
They’re hoping for the former, and one way New American Public Art supports that vision is by making most of their projects open-source so that others can recreate and rejigger them free of charge. “Technology has taken so many leaps recently, and part of that has been people opening up their designs,” Weissman says. “We view open source as the tide that lifts all boats, so we’re very happy and honored to be able to contribute to that community.”
Top Right Photo Credit: Bianca Mauro
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