LED is the new bronze, as a dazzling array of public art is set to illuminate our dark Olympic nights and plug Vancouver in

It’s a pretty desolate site—for now. Beneath the Second Avenue end of the Cambie Street Bridge, near the recently opened Canada Line station, there’s a pedestrian sector that is all raw concrete, dark asphalt, and grim functionality. In form and mood, it is cold, stark, and impersonal. Within the next few weeks, however, it will be warmed, humanized, and enlivened. The agent of this transformation? A light-based sculpture by international new-media artist Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez.

Titled Garde-Temps, it is one of a dazzling array of light-based works commissioned by the City of Vancouver’s Olympic and Paralympic public-art program for installation this coming winter. From robotic searchlights to video screens and from street lamps to architectural illumination, these projects signal an art-world trend—the use of light as a medium.

Garde-Temps is a three-metre-high glass and metal vase that acts as a screen for moving images. Through an ingenious coupling of thermography and digital technology, the images are gathered from the site itself: the heat that emanates from people walking and bicycling nearby will be picked up by a thermal camera and transformed into threads of light on the curved screen of the vase.

On the phone from her home in Paris, Ruiz Gutiérrez confirms, “The materiality of the object is light itself.” More explicitly, she says, “It’s an electronic object clothed by weaving patterns, and the patterns are woven by the heat traces of passersby.” Then she adds with a laugh, “Whenever the object is unplugged, it’s as if it was naked.”

Unplugged, our city would be naked, too. Vancouver’s ambitious new light works, both permanent and temporary, will warm and brighten our long northern nights. And, as with all good public art, they will also help interpret Vancouver to the world—and to itself.

Monument for East Vancouver

Public art long ago abandoned the notion that it had to conform to conventional ideas of medium, message, and location. Recently, however, innovations in digital technology have greatly expanded forms of creative expression and have given new-media and multimedia artists huge access to the public realm. Light is the new bronze.

Light, of course, is an inextricable element of urban life, and there’s a persistent coupling in our minds of bright lights and glamorous cosmopolitanism. Think New York’s Times Square, Tokyo’s Ginza district, or London’s Piccadilly Circus. At the same time, environmental attitudes are changing. For conservation reasons, cities are rethinking how they light their streets and buildings. A number of Vancouver’s public-art commissions employ LEDs, coupling urban themes with environmentally friendly functionality.

An example is Ice Light, a permanent LED installation by Berlin-based Gunda Fí¶rster, designed to illuminate and animate the exterior of City Hall while reducing power consumption. In an artist’s statement sent to the Straight, Fí¶rster writes about why she is drawn to light as a medium. “Light is a basic element—without light, there is no life. Besides, light is a very changeable element.”¦It exists in endlessly different versions.”

Other Vancouver light-based artworks—completed or in progress—include Ken Lum’s LED–lit Monument for East Vancouver, which will stand on the rise at Clark Drive and 6th Avenue. David MacWilliam’s Kingsway Luminaires, a series of sculptures in the form of colour-shifting street lamps, is already installed on medians east and west of the intersection of Kingsway and Knight Street.