Lights on Market Street Installation: Faces by Theodore Watson

Theodore Watson, artist of Lights on Market Street installation Faces, enlightens us on the inspiration for his installation and working in Central Market. Take a picture at the capture station located at 998 Market Street (at Sixth Street) and see your image projected onto the wall of the Furniture Store building located at 1017 Market Street.

The installation is called Faces. It is an interactive installation that captures your portrait and projects a graphic interpretation of it at a large scale above Market Street.

What is the inspiration for your installation?

The area around Market Street, Sixth Street, and Golden Gate Avenue has quite an interesting mix of people, some local to that area and others coming through. Most are quite shut off to what is around them though and for the most part stay in their own bubble. I thought it could be interesting to make a work that could surprise passers by, transforming the corner with something dynamic and playful, while at the same time helping to creating a platform for sharing stories and creating connections based on the faces captured and displayed over Market Street. Visually the work draws a lot from wheat paste graffiti portraits and the work of JR was definitely a nice reference, particularly to the scale I was going after.

How has it been to work on a site-specific installation in Central Market?

I think really interesting. There is such a wide spectrum of people and I have already met some really great people hanging out testing my installation. Last night we tested the Faces from 5:30 to 11:00 p.m. and one guy hung out the whole time taking his picture, encouraging others to have their picture taken, it was really amazing to see different people coming together to have this unusual shared experience, stopping for a moment to do something different and to interact with people they might have never spoken too. I think it will be interesting to see what stories and encounters emerge from the project over the coming months.

About the artist:

Theodore Watson is an artist, designer and experimenter whose work is born out of the curiosity and excitement of designing experiences that come alive and invite people to play. Theodore’s work ranges from creating new tools for artistic expression, experimental musical systems, to immersive, interactive environments with full-body interaction. His recent work includes the Eyewriter, an eye controlled drawing tool, Graffiti Research Lab’s Laser Tag, laser graffiti system and Funky Forest, an immersive interactive ecosystem for young children. Watson works together with Zachary Lieberman and Arturo Castro on openFrameworks, which is an open source library for writing creative code in C++.

Watson’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern; Ars Electronica; The Sundance Film Festival; Res Fest; REMF; Cinekid, Montevideo; OFFF; SHIFT; ICHIM; The Creators Series; Deitch Projects; Eyebeam; Pixel Gallery and Museum N8. In 2010, the Eyewriter project won the Future Everything award and the Design of the Year award for the interactive category.