Man-made lights
MAKE NIGHTS SPARKLE AT DISCOVERY GREEN
From across the lawn, “Firmament” looks like an invitation to a party.
But once you’re under the 52-foot-wide canopy of colorful changing lights, this holiday art installation at Discovery Green exerts a quiet magic.
People slow down. They lollygag. Even lie on the grass, enveloped by the strains of “The Nutcracker” as they gaze up at a star-shaped grid of 21,600 LED modules.
If even the thought of Peter Tchaikovsky’s over-played ballet score makes you cringe, listen up: This experience could be a revelation. There’s something stirringly pure about it.
When tech innovator and lighting artist Christopher Schardt unveiled “Firmament” at the Burning Man Festival two years ago, people spontaneously stood up and danced during the “Waltz of the Flowers.”
Nery Gonzalez and his family, who are from Mexico, were visiting Discovery Green for the first time on Tuesday. The adults sat on the edge; the kids rolled on the grass under the lights, all feeling
delighted.
Pablo and Jacki Garcia of Cypress had brought out-of-town company to the park. They sat quite a while under “Firmament,” soaking up the sensory pleasures on an evening when the temperature was perfect.
“This takes glam cam to a whole new level,” said Houstonian Joni King. Her husband had his camera set up on a tripod nearby.
Schardt was pleased to see people enjoying his work.
“The best art pieces are the ones that are also environments — places for people to be,” he said. “Firmament” is like a temple, he said — “a gathering ground for people to come with their friends, hang out for a long time, have weddings, make proposals.”
Yes, people have gotten engaged and married under “Firmament.”
“I’m fascinated with the world of modern art becoming more about spaces, more about something you get right away,” Schadt said. “Art should transmit a feeling, an emotion or some information by itself. If you need a plaque to explain it, maybe the art hasn’t done its job.”
At Burning Man, an annual gathering of artists and revelers in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, “Firmament” ran nine days, and Schardt stayed with it. This time, he’s trusting it will run itself for six weeks. He also will find out how it handles rain.
Schardt, a computer programmer who until this year was making iPhone apps for a living, loves that kind of challenge. He invented machines as a kid but didn’t make his first sculpture until 2000.
For more than a decade, he awed Burning Man visitors with large-scale installations that shot fire and consumed copious amounts of propane. He designed his first light piece — a big ball with randomly arranged LEDs — in 2013.
It worked so well he decided to share the software. His L.E.D. Lab is sold via the iTunes store and has tens of thousands of users worldwide.
It’s the same software that’s running “Firmament,” which is supported by a 42-foot-tall aluminum tower.
“I always make something that is pleasing to me. … Things that seem beautiful and kind of fun to make,” Schardt said.
He likes to give himself a technical challenge. With “Firmament,” that meant designing a triangular grid to create a six pointed star shape. “Most of the time, LEDs are arranged in rectangular grids; that’s just the way you think in computer graphics,” he said.
Constructing the piece was a marathon effort involving an army of friends and family who helped him attach the LED modules to bird netting with about 50,000 zip ties.
For September’s ArtPrize Festival in Grand Rapids, Mich., Schardt created a floating installation involving 32 LED strips that wiggled underwater in the current of the Grand River — “so you got to see an image distorted by the water.”
Schardt, who lives in Oakland, Calif., said he’s now making enough from his art to support his family, and he’s received his first commission.
While he was in Houston, he took time out to experience James Turrell’s “Twilight Epiphany” skyspace at Rice University.
“That’s a very nice place,” he said. It exuded a more minimal kind of quiet, inspiring Schardt to think about creating new pieces with fewer moving parts and fewer lights — “a different kind of space.”
You can expect his music to stay classical, though.
He fell in love with “The Nutcracker” score because it was playing all the time at home: His 8-year-old daughter has been performing bit parts in the ballet since she was 3.
“A lot of people think it’s just corny Christmas music. It’s not,” he said. “It’s really well done.”