On July 1–31 from 11:57pm – 12am Nancy Baker Cahill’s Slipstream Times Square will play. Displayed on over 90 billboards eSlipstream Times Square transfigures the bewildering, dizzying energy of Times Square through a vibrant, abstract artwork. The video’s shifting landscape began as analog graphite drawings on paper, which Baker Cahill tore apart and then reformed into sculptures before digitizing them into new animated forms. The resulting creation calls to mind a surreal canyon that moves like an ocean, or something even more organic. The animations glisten as they seem to breathe, expand, and contract, pulsing with an energy that almost threatens to spill out into the open space below. Occupying space normally reserved for commercial advertising, Slipstream Times Square aims to transform this iconic space by inviting conversations about what is real, what is alive, and what we see and feel when digital-analog boundaries are blurred.
Nancy Baker Cahill’s Slipstream artworks begin their long journey as graphite drawings on paper. The drawings are then torn into pieces and reconfigured into bespoke, sculptural configurations that gesture towards organic or botanical forms. Echoing recombinant DNA, each installation represents an iterative version of the one before. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit, and animated using CG software. Once composited, they exist as discrete looped videos. A final step returns them to paper—forever altered—as archival prints, in triptychs, which isolate sequential dramatic moments in their respective animations.
Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 90 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57 pm to midnight. This year, Times Square Arts is celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the Midnight Moment series with a roster of all women artists until April 2023.
Nancy Baker Cahill is a new media artist who examines power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness through drawing and shared immersive space. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression.
Her geolocated AR installations have been exhibited globally and have earned her profiles in the New York Times, Frieze Magazine, and The Art Newspaper, among other publications, and she was included in ARTnews’ list of 2021 ‘Deciders’. Her work has been internationally exhibited at museums and galleries, including Francisco Carolinum Linz, The Hermitage, The Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA), Honor Fraser Gallery, and Konig Gallerie. In February of 2022, she was one of two featured artists in the Elevation 1049 Biennial in Switzerland. Baker Cahill was an artist scholar in the Berggruen lnstitute’s inaugural Transformations of the Human Fellowship, and a 2021 resident at Oxy Arts’ ‘Encoding Futures,’ focused on virtual monuments. She is a TEDx speaker and a member of the Guild of Future Architects. In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and received a 2022 C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship.
Suzanna, co-owns and publishes the newspaper Times Square Chronicles or T2C. At one point a working actress, she has performed in numerous productions in film, TV, cabaret, opera and theatre. She has performed at The New Orleans Jazz festival, The United Nations and Carnegie Hall. She has a screenplay and a TV show in the works, which she developed with her mentor and friend the late Arthur Herzog. She is a proud member of the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle and was a nominator. Email: suzanna@t2conline.com
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