Client: Boston Properties, Sales Force

Overview

Lightdoves fly the sky canvas of the Sales Force Tower. The art is a 65' tall screen made up of 11,000 LEDs that translate video content into images that can be seen from 20 miles away by a million people in San Francisco, Bay Area. The designer and curator of Tower Art, Jim Campbell, invited me play my Lightdove art series in April 2023.

Goals

As a long-time open-water swimmer, Lahaie takes inspiration from the seabirds she sees in San Francisco Bay as context for a huge-scale Lightbird Migration on the Salesforce Tower. These birds of light were born out of Lahaie's concern for the effects of climate change on seabird populations: rising water temperatures are leading to cascading impacts on marine ecosystems, with a high frequency of mass seabird mortality. The ethereal Lightbirds bring attention to the effects of rising temperatures on seabirds. Since the 1970s, the bird population has declined by one billion nationally. Lahaie's celebration of architectural scale birds in flight is an elegy for those we've lost and provides solace for us who remain.

Process

Salesforce Tower engineer, Jim Campbell provided our team with visualization software to test our reels in preparation for the low-resolution tower screen. We had three in-person tests to upload our Lightbird optimal visual effect with the Tower technology, and the first two tests were illegible. Over that time, we edited scale, contrast, speed, color, and frame position for a contextually and technically successful project. Hanh Nguyen of Running Reel Films is the videographer/editor

Additional Information

In 2023, the Lightbird Migration was featured on San Francisco's KPIX CBS live special and won the CODAworx top 20 San Francisco Public Art projects. It can currently be seen this summer from dusk to midnight at the diRosa Center for Contemporary Art building in Napa, CA.