Laurie Anderson has performed an unrecorded song about the buff billboard “underwear giants” who dominate Times Square. The giants who surrounded the Museum of Modern Art from January 16 to February 12, though, were of the cinematic variety. And while not advertising per se, the event generated plenty of media buzz about turning the museum “inside-out” to create an avant-garde drive-in theater.

Video artist Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers consisted of five interconnected 18-minute films projected on eight separate glass and concrete surfaces surrounding three sides of MoMA, which commissioned the work in conjunction with New York-based arts organization Creative Time. Actors Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, Brazilian pop star Seu Jorge, alterna-folkie Cat Powers, and real-life subway drummer and bike messenger Ryan Donowho play alienated graveyard-shift workers who find fleeting redemption in their nocturnal daydreams. Sutherland plays a bored executive, Powers a bored postal worker; Sutherland fantasizes about tap dancing on a taxi roof, Powers about spinning in circles.

Local audio-video-lighting specialists Scharff Weisberg navigated the project’s technological hurdles. “Doug really had to keep in mind that we were projecting on rock, paint, and translucent surfaces,” says Jacob Weisberg. “His images had to be vibrant and easily discernible, with well-saturated color and contrast. Doug quickly identified the energy you need to get images to jump off those surfaces. It’s beautifully shot and transferred, and we were all amazed at how well the details stood up to these really large screen sizes and atypical image surfaces.”

Aitken’s videos were shot in high definition then projected in HD through eight separate synchronized video streams—including one on a fourth-floor terrace across the street from the museum—linked by a directional WiFi net and unique software protocol. Images mirror and loop and play off one another like phrases in a Philip Glass composition, creating memorable resonances in what Aitken has characterized as “silent film for the twenty-first century.”

“Every evening I discover something else—a cloud overhead moving at the same speed as those in the piece, for example,” says Creative Time curator Peter Eleey of the experience. “The most interesting thing to me, though, is how quiet everyone is while watching the work. Whether out of deference to a silent film, or because people want to hear the sounds of the city, or simply because we tend not to want to talk when no one else is, I’m not sure. But it is fascinating.” —Richard Gehr

www.moma.org

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