8. Projection Napping at Times Square
Photo courtesy of Cultural Counsel
Time Square Arts’ Midnight Moment series debuts Project Napping in October. The creator behind the project Optical Animal, a digital artist collective, started this video installation project back in 2016 and had featured the project in Berlin and Rome before coming to New York. If visitors walk through Time Square between 11:57 pm and midnight during any day in October, they would see dozens of video installations displaying giant sleeping figures on the electronic billboards.
According to what visionaries behind the project said in a press statement, Times Square’s installation is meant to “offer a shared moment of respite” in a city known as the city that never sleeps. Optical Animal said in a press statement that “the concept for Projection Napping grew out of a desire to locate a more human, and more interpersonal realm for the medium of projection mapping. Building off of a play on words, the project dives into an exploration of sleep, and the line we draw between private and public space.