Peter Burr: Sunshine Monument
Sept 20–Oct 28, 2024
Peter Burr: Sunshine Monument
Peter Burr, screenshot of Sunrise Monument at sunrise, 2023
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.
Peter Burr (b. 1980; Brooklyn, New York) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice often engages with tools of the video game industry in the form of immersive cinematic artworks. His works have been presented internationally at Documenta 14, Athens (2017); MoMA PS1, New York; and the Barbican Centre, London, among others. Burr previously worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez, through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multigenerational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His work has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship.
On the Hour
On the Hour is a series of internet art projects that mark every full hour around the clock, unfolding over a time frame of thirty seconds. Replacing the Sunrise/Sunset series, which ran from 2009 to 2023 and marked sunset and sunrise in New York City, On the Hour projects are commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org.
Using whitney.org as their habitat, On the Hour projects disrupt, replace, or explore the museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the internet, the intervention in existing online spaces.
To see the current project, be anywhere on this website on the hour.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to internet art and its online gallery space for commissions of net art.