Allard van Hoorn: Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine
May 22–June 21, 2017
Allard van Hoorn, screenshot of Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine at sunrise, 2017
Allard van Hoorn's Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine visually and verbally translates the sky above the Whitney Museum. Using the names of the Dutch Boy house paint colors as a “haiku engine,” it generates site-specific poetry for day and night. At sunrise and sunset, a screenshot of a patch of sky above the Whitney is taken from a webcam view of the Manhattan skyline. The image is then pixelated to extract a range of colors, which are matched to swatches of the Dutch Boy colors, known for their poetic naming lexicon. For 30 seconds at sunrise and sunset, whitney.org is tiled with these colored paint swatches and their accompanying labels, representing the colors of the sky at that moment. The project uses the sky as a free zone of imagination and draws attention to the perception of our environment.
Allard van Hoorn (b. 1968) is a sound, installation and performance artist creating choreographies and musical scores for architecture, scenographies for the built environment and scripts for investigating our relationships to public and architectural spaces. His work has been shown at institutions and events including the 7th Bucharest Biennale; 1st Yinchuan Biennale; 6th Marrakech Biennale; 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial; 2nd Tbilisi Triennial; 12th Biennal de la Havana; 2013 Shenzhen / Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture; 2011 Gwangju Design Biennial; ISCP, NYC; Rosenthal CAC, Cincinnati; de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Storefront for Art and Architecture; NYC, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.
Sunrise/Sunset was a series of Internet art projects that marked sunset and sunrise in New York City every day from 2009 to 2024. All were commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org, each project unfolding over a time frame of ten to thirty seconds.
Indicating the switch from day to night and vice versa in one specific location, Sunrise/Sunset projects played with the perception of time and space, underscoring the physical location of the Whitney Museum and the global accessibility of virtual space. The series was organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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