incandescent installation

Jim Campbell's

'Scattered Light'

At first sight, the hundreds of dangling lightbulbs that make up Jim Campbell’s enormous, 3-D, Madison Square Park installation Scattered Light seem to float in mid-air and flicker at random. But, if you take a closer look you'll soon be able to make out what seems like human shadows dancing across the suspended star-like lights.

 "Most of these works -- if you pause them -- you can't tell what you're looking at," says artist Jim Campbell. 'Scattered Light' is a 50-foot-long array on an 80-foot wide, 16-foot-high and 16-foot-deep structure supporting over 1,600 lightbulbs fitted with LEDs, which are programmed to display a low-resolution, moving image as individual pixels. 

Using footage he shot at Grand Central Station, Campbell's 'Scattered Light' displays edgeless, shadowy figures seemingly walking through space. Up close, the images displayed on 'Scattered Light' look like nothing more than a series of oscillating bulbs, but the images come into focus as the viewer moves further away from the installation.

images via switched.com & madisonsquarepark.org

For 'Scattered Light', Campbell's studio sawed the tops off of 1,800 lightbulbs and replaced all of the coils with LED's in a process that took weeks.

This marvelous, three-dimensional field of light also known as 'Scattered Light' is on view at Madison Square Park from now until February 2011.