Painting the Town Red/Green/Blue
After persuading New York-based grocer Fresh Direct that they weren't planning to do something rude, critical or distracting to passing motorists, architects Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch of Terraswarm were granted their wish this Spring: a few nights' access to the company's flat panel video billboard--the largest of its kind in the United States. This 65-by-90-foot behemoth is located in an industrial area of Queens, where it is seen by millions of motorists atop the Long Island Expressway as they approach Manhattan.
Terraswarm turned off the gargantuan advertising after midnight on a few inhospitably cold nights in February and March, and replaced it with Color Shift, a sequence of saturated color fields designed to illuminate the neighborhood around the billboard. The effects of this continuous stream of pixellated color washes on the surrounding architecture were documented by Terraswarm and their collaborators Scott Kuzio and Stefan Hagen in large format photos and a 3-channel, high-definition video in an exhibition currently at Columbia University's Avery Hall through April 30.
