5. January’s Midnight Moment in Times Square

Photograph by Ian Douglas for Times Square Arts

At midnight on every night in January the work of French visual artist and director Vergine Keaton will grace the mega-screens of Times Square. Times Square Alliance’s January Midnight Moment will feature Keaton’s I was crying out at life (2009), an animation that “inverts classical hunting and landscape scenes from 19th-century engravings to tell a tale of stags chasing hounds.” Keaton says of the piece, “Times Square is the ultra-urban, the very incarnation of remoteness from natural life. That the deer, dogs, and birds will pelt down in their furious race across the screens of the city, towering over the audience, seems to me to add yet another dimension to the film—bringing nature where it once was and showing its timelessness against the scale of human construction.” I was crying out at life is presented in partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF) during the Animation First festival.