Winston-Salem Light Project

Coinciding with the 6 Days in November event this week, from November 16th -20th from 6:00PM-11:30 PM, you can view The Winston-Salem Light Project (WSLP), a multimedia public art presentation using the facades of prominent downtown buildings as the canvas. The lighting and projected images are designed by UNCSA college seniors using image and projection software. Non-senior students provide the technical crew for the project.

 The Pepper Building WSLP 2009 

The past two years of WSLP have provided downtown Winston with the Millennium Lighting Project in 2008, and the Pepper Building in 2009. The 2010 WSLP will continue to re-imagine the downtown area, including an exterior of the Winston-Salem Journal building, a block of trees lining Fourth Street, the Chatham Building and the pedestrian bridges crossing Cherry Street. The project will examine reflection where viewers are invited to consider their own reflections in their art, city, each other and themselves. Imagine a mosaic of your face, made up of images of the city and its community members, projected via live video on a storefront window; or the side of a prominent downtown building used as the canvas for a massive high-speed video projection showcasing dazzling close-ups of the city's most stirring culinary experiences. Now walk under a block of trees transformed into an array of light and color, blazing with fluorescent tint; head down Marshall to the Winston-Salem Journal and find a moment of serenity and personal reflection.

By juxtaposing the large industrial scale with the personal immediate, the WSLP 2010 will provide an opportunity for participants to see their city in an entirely new light. By shaking up objective experience we are allowing the individual to reflect on themselves and the city of which they are a part.

All human experience contains a kind of reflective judgment born of our desire to see universals within given particulars––whether it is in our art, in society, or ourselves we intrinsically and continually seek that unknown universal. Immanuel Kant tells us this universal is the human encounter known as pleasure, and this pleasure does not arise out of mere sensation, but reflection. Remembering that everything we see is reflected light brings light’s power to sculpt and reveal to the center of this search for pleasure, connection and ultimately ourselves.