Peter Burr: Sunshine Monument

Peter Burr’s Sunshine Monument initially launched as part of the Sunrise/Sunset series. The work later ran hourly, marking the transition to the new On the Hour series.

Sunshine Monument consists of seven animated architectures—one for each weekday—that reflect on museum structures literally and symbolically. Each animation of Burr’s signature black-and-white graphic elements translates the blocks of text and images on the Whitney’s website into an abstract building populated by wandering figures, while still maintaining the layout’s adaptability to the vertical and horizontal orientation of computer screens and mobile devices. The animations channel the late Web 2.0 landscape of social media and user-generated content, an increasingly indexed, optimized, and gamified environment.

Burr frames the project as a monument to the sun, making a round icon the centerpiece for an architectural organism commemorating the sun and driven by its rise and disappearance. Interspersed text elements, generated by the artist using AI, poetically reflect on sunlight and museum structures. Using the moment of sunrise and sunset, as well as graphic space as a metaphor, Sunshine Monument depicts a flow of figures continuously moving through the structure or falling off its edges. The animations highlight the contrast between the ephemeral flow of short-term visitors to a museum site and the long-term engagement of its stakeholders, from artists to staff and patrons.