ART@NIGHT

How do you make music with plastic bottles, a toothbrush, a deck of cards and a kitchen scrub cloth? Or how do you make a photograph of your friends using a flashlight and a five-minute exposure time? This is not a document about your average art program for kids. Rather, ART@NIGHT the documentary takes its name from one of America's most innovative contemporary art programs.

And using a combination of live-action footage and fun photo-animation techniques, what emerges is a high-energy, ground-level look at the experiences of elementary school kids in the process of exploring and discovering new ways to perceive and re-create their world.

This project borrows from the so-called secular world of urban graphic communication to project a message of beauty and universality. The video and lighting projections can be seen as creating a contingent order out of the density of images and messages that the dogmas of technology and marketing offer.

The projection of the ART@NIGHT logo and colored lighting on the facade of the church mixed graphic "branding" of the project and events with what is thought of as a marketing-free zone: sacred space.

The goals of the lighting of the church is twofold: to promote the live events happening inside and to create a public illumination of the church architecture for all to see outside.

Director & editor: John Scott. Animation & photography: Mary Kocol. Music composer: Ken Ueno. Executive producer: John Ruggieri. Quicktime video courtesy Peter Bullis, video editor, Brickyard VFX. Lighting equipment courtesy High Output.

The public art project ART@NIGHT, and accompanying documentary video, are supported by a $30,000 grant from the Fund for the Arts, a restricted fund of the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• John Ruggieri
• Abstraction Made Elementary
• children
• abstract
• art
• painting
• Child Art
• John D. Scott
• Ken Ueno
• Mary Kocol
• Duane Slick
• Peter Bullis
• Flashlight Photography
• Sand Stories
• Documentary
• Boston
• Jamaica Plain
• Unitarian Church