I had this moment where I connected software and light and space. My first light sculpture was created at Burning Man—a communal gathering spot, a digital campfire that brings people together. That idea is firmly rooted in my work.
Leo Villareal, in “Leo Villareal Interview for Wonder,” Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, filmed 2015, video, 1:38 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=cfj_E8r-vCk.
Leo Villareal is an “artist-as-programmer.”1 He starts with a simple set of programming rules, like on and off, to build complex sequences of moving light—pulsating patterns, rippling waves, and starry clusters of glowing LEDs. Early in his career, the artist was drawn to the idea that a minimal amount of information can grow into an elaborate system; he looked to John Conway’s Game of Life, a life-simulation game developed in 1970 that self-evolves from a binary code.2 As in Conway’s Life, the underlying structure or “essence” of Villareal’s pieces is the code itself,3 but orderly rules of machines and software presumed to be lifeless give way to whole visual worlds—energetic fields that transform the built environment into immersive portals.
Steven B. Johnson, in “Introduction: The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithms,” in Leo Villareal, ed. JoAnne Northrup (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 12. ↩︎
Leo Villareal, in “Leo Villareal: 1. Programming,” National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, filmed 2008, video, 3:53 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=ygIKBc9gaUQ. ↩︎
Leo Villareal, in Steven B. Johnson in “Introduction: The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithms,” in Leo Villareal, ed. JoAnne Northrup (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 11. ↩︎
There is an enchanting stillness to Leo Villareal’s color-field light sculptures. When he was an undergraduate student, the artist spent hours staring into the meditative beauty of a Mark Rothko painting in the Yale University Art Gallery.1 Twenty years later, the influence of Rothko’s color field painting appeared in Villareal’s visual manifestation of code. Uninterested in the “‘arm’s race’ of video games and computer graphics” that tends to seek speed and clarity, the artist considered instead, “How few dots can I get?”2 He applied translucent sheets of acrylic to his LED light-grid substructures to diffuse their pixels and sequenced slower, more subtle light movement to a captivating effect. Like looking at what Villareal calls a “digital campfire,” they take the mind on a primordial journey.
On his first trip to Burning Man in 1994, Leo Villareal found himself profoundly lost in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert—a disorienting landscape without roads or landmarks. In 1997, he went back to that desert prepared with an idea to help him get back to camp. For what would become his first light sculpture—a purely utilitarian device—the artist programmed a grid structure of sixteen strobe lights with a microcontroller to pulse off and on. In the desert, the lights could be seen from miles away.1 Across this span of space, Villareal had the sense that the lights were “trying to communicate, to say something.”2 Their pulsating sequence transmitted an abstract message and, like many of the artist’s awe-inspiring light works, effected a kind of “psychedelic perceptual experience.”3
Elizabeth Manchester, “Leo Villareal,” in Light Show, ed. Cliff Lauson (London: Hayward Publishing; and New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2013), 163–65. ↩︎
Leo Villareal, “Light and Code as a Medium in the 21st Century,” lecture given at TEDx Talks, Orient Harbor, New York, September 2017, video, 15:13 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=aQWYvzwXkkM. ↩︎
Elizabeth Manchester, “Leo Villareal,” in Light Show, ed. Cliff Lauson (London: Hayward Publishing; and New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2013), 165. ↩︎
Spanning 1.8 miles across the San Francisco Bay, Leo Villareal’s monumental light sculpture The Bay Lights (2013), one of the artist’s most ambitious projects, captures the atmospheric wonder of the city. Envisioning the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge as a canvas, he developed a plan to install and program 25,000 custom-designed LEDs along the bridge’s suspension cables. On an early site visit, Villareal walked a cable to the top of a bridge tower; five hundred feet over the traffic and rippling water, the feeling of fog and movement of air and water captured the artist’s imagination. With a crew of engineers, he had the north side of the western span of the bridge laced with delicate electronics that he could control through his computer. For months after the installation was complete, Villareal sat beneath the bridge with his laptop, live programming the lights and trying to channel the awe he felt from the top of the tower by creating a set of parameters that allow unique sequences to occur every time the bridge lights up.1
Leo Villareal, “Light and Code as a Medium in the 21st Century,” lecture given at TEDx Talks, Orient Harbor, New York, September 2017, video, 15:13 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=aQWYvzwXkkM. ↩︎
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