Allard van Hoorn: Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine

May 22–June 21, 2017

Labeled blue color swatches overlay whitney.org.

Allard van Hoorn’s Sunrise/Sunset Haiku Engine translates the sky above the Whitney Museum of American Art into colors and words. 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 Dutch Boy paints (known for their poetic names). For thirty seconds at sunrise and sunset, whitney.org is tiled with these paint colors and the accompanying labels evoking the sky’s shade of blue or gray at that time. With the project, van Hoorn uses the sky as a free zone of imagination and draws attention to the sensory perception of our environment.

Allard van Hoorn (b. 1968; Leiden, Netherlands) 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. He is the founder and curator of the Platform for Urban Investigation, a nomadic, cross-disciplinary research academy investigating urban environments around the world, working with architects, designers, choreographers, musicians, and visual artists.

His work has been shown at institutions and events including the Bucharest Biennale, Yinchuan Biennale, Marrakech Biennale, and Istanbul Design Biennial (all 2016); Tbilisi Triennial and Bienal de la Habana (both 2015); Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (2013); Gwangju Design Biennale (2011); International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; the Rosenthal Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; de Appel, Amsterdam; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Sunrise/Sunset

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 and the global accessibility of virtual environments.

artport

View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.