Chicago Rediscovered in a Luminous Field, at Cloud Gate only through Monday

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Ever since its unveiling at the opening of Chicago's spectacular Millennium Park in 2004, Anish Kapoor's  Cloud Gate sculpture, more popularly known as Da Bean, has been casting its funhouse reflections of cityscape and observers alike, but this week for the first time the amoeba-like sculpture was turned over to artists to exploit its mirroring potential.

Luminous Field, created by Chicago artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero of Luftwerk, is an installation of patterns of light and color projected down on Cloud Gate and its plinth by 10 projectors mounted on high towers, to a soundtrack of music composed by Owen Clayton Condon of Third Coast Percussion.  On certain nights, the installation also included concerts, and performers from the Collaboraction theater company.

"We create the stage for you to be there," says the team in this video.


The video shows the projections as a visual whole, which you'll probably have difficulty seeing as the installation has proven immensely popular, filling the "public playground"with people.  Since projectors don't discriminate, the crowd itself becomes a screen, with the presentation existing in three dimensions - on the plinth, in reflection on Cloud Gate, and on the spectators, themselves.

Luminous Field is a compelling demonstration - at once amazing and gentle - of the convergence of art, theater and architecture in the living dynamic of a great city.  Bathing it in striking patterns, Luftwerk helps us see and feel the city which we inhabit, workaday, often unseeing and unfeeling.  A benign bug-zapper for human beings, Luminous Field's light and sound draws in the politely jostling crowd, a flash mob of interacting strangers, individual personalities whose lives may never intersect again, for a small succession of moments finding common purpose in an exercise of the delight of being alive.

Luminous Field runs only Saturday, February 18th, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m., and Sunday and Monday, the 19th and 20th, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.