 I want to welcome everyone to Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. I am Andrea Lipps, Associate Curator of Contemporary Design, and we are excited to spend a bit of time together tonight to dig into public design and art installations with our esteemed guests. And as I mentioned, we're doing this within a type timeframe. So I'm going to keep us as our moderator and our host, very punctual. But I do just want to start out and say that Cooper Hewitt was the curatorial partner for this year's Times Square Valentine Heart Competition, which was organized by Times Square Arts. And so our partnership and Times Square's competition was the impetus for tonight's conversation to celebrate and to probe the process and the importance of public design installations within our cities. So following a brief introduction, our speakers will provide a succinct presentation of their work on public design and art installations, and then they will join me back on stage for a conversation. So to introduce our speakers tonight, the designers of the Times Square Heart installation, I am pleased to welcome Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts to the stage. Thank you, it's nice to be here. So I'm Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts. I oversee the public art program in Times Square. And so as Andrea mentioned, every, well, for 12 years running now, we've hosted this Valentine Heart Design Competition, and it's intended for the city's emerging and mid-career architects and designers, first and foremost, to have a chance to take on something that hopefully is freeing from the constraints that's conventional to their field, but also to imagine a symbol of love for New York City. And so while we're more or less experts on Times Square, we're by no means experts on design, I'm not sure if you've visited Times Square lately, could use a little design work. But, you know, so in that sense, the success of this competition does very much depend on the vision and the expertise of our partner. So we're very grateful to be working with Cooper Hewitt. I wanna specifically thank Andrea. If anyone has not gotten a tour from Andrea here on any topic, please get that. And I also wanna thank Ruth Starr, Pam Horn, Kim Roblita-Diga, and Alexa Griffith. And this year we were also very lucky to be working with Modu and Eric Forman, the designers behind Heart Squared. We were very excited to receive what we feel is a delightful, expansive, accessible, inclusive vision for what love could look like in Times Square. So I'll briefly introduce you with your esteemed bios, and then I'll turn the stage over to you all to have this conversation. So Fu Huang and Raheli Rotem founded their architecture practice Modu in 2012. They were awarded the esteemed Founders' Rome Prize in Architecture in 2017, followed by the US-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship from the NEA in 2018, and the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York in 2019. In addition to their award-winning practice, they teach at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture and at Rhode Island School of Design, and they both received a Master's of Architecture from Columbia University. Eric Forman is an artist and designer working at the intersections of fine art, design, architecture, and new technology. He founded his eponymous Eric Forman Studio in 2003, and in 2012 was a founding member of the really fantastic new lab at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In addition to developing interactive experiences, Eric is head of innovation at the Interaction Design MFA program at SVA. He received his Master's in 2002 from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. So, hope you enjoy the conversation tonight. Good evening. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you, Times Square Arts, and Cooper Ewitt for this and the experience of building something in Times Square, which doesn't happen every day, and I spent so many hours there, also not expected. Modu is an architecture and design firm based in Brooklyn. If we talk about the behind the scene, the behind the scene is us communicating, and this is made by a catalog of terms that represent different ideas. They're usually contradictions because we kind of think differently on every possible issue. So, outdoor room, indoor urbanism, what else here, open architecture, all these things that blur inside and outside and question what is private and what is public and who is it for. I was born in Israel, Phu, in Saigon, Vietnam, which means that we not only speak a different language from right to left and left to right, we also think that way. So, it's a logic. Therefore, those terms actually have multi-directions. One of them that you can read below actually represent both objective way of thinking but also super personal way of thinking about these terms. So, they're both objective and highly personal. We think of it as a disruptive language that artificial intelligence will never be able to truly understand. Cloud seating, our first project for today is invited competition in Tel Aviv. We're invited to try to revitalize a huge square in front of this amazing museum by Ron Arad, which is actually unused. And if you have been in that area in the Middle East, you would know that extremely hot, very reflective, and basically there is no shade in that square. So, we propose a shade structure made of 30,000 balls from three different sizes, basically raised landscape on top of a green roof structure, which is both local and global. So, the idea is basically to create shade that is not only based on the movement of the sun and the changing of that movement, but actually shade that is based on the breeze connecting to the environment, the local environment, which basically kind of flushed the city of breeze coming from the Mediterranean Sea, creating this landscape of multiple endless possibilities and scenarios of every time you would go to this site, you would basically experience a different weather. For us, these ideas to create connection and a sense of belonging to a place through connecting to something bigger than you, which is the environment and social interactions. As architect, we always try to determine what's gonna be underneath, what program, but who actually owns this space? Is it the public? Is the museum who funded it? Can it be a room in the city? Is it a bed or is it a lounge and so on? So for us actually to not to create a program that is too descriptive is something that we were kind of was very important for us. And slowly through time, you can see that different things started to happen and people incorporated this space as part of their daily routine, which of course makes us really happy in that sense. Architecture is never complete without the people who are engaging with it. So yeah, find a kind of few images of this kind of landscape, floating landscape. And luckily we didn't lose the balls. I'm sure when the questions is like, how the balls didn't move, but a few details here, which will reveal later. So competitions are important to our practice because it allows us to speculate. But we also launch our own initiatives because they also allow us to speculate, but it also allows us to seek organizations that align with our particular core values, especially what we call indoor urbanism, which essentially is asking a question, how can we live in cities better? We need to redraw both our environmental and our social boundaries and cities can be simultaneously more connected and more personal. As Rome Prize Fellows in architecture at the American Academy in Rome, we researched 30 years of incomplete architecture in Italy, jumping fences, crossing into these kinds of incomplete buildings. And what we learned was that there was 600 of these cities and towns that had incomplete structures. The incomplete are modern ruins. They're found spaces, urban leftovers without futures, but they're also spaces of indoor urbanism, indoor, outdoor for public engagement. When we return back to the US, the incomplete in Italy got translated into the abandoned in the US, focusing on post-industrial cities. We're currently doing work in Newberg, New York, which has a very large amount of vacant properties. This is using design to mobilize it to reimagine these abandoned buildings as interim publics. These are mini buildings within buildings, lightweight modular structures that are received to occupy larger buildings. The line is a mini building that would be a hub for activities to grow from during the spring, summer, and fall. During the winter, the utilities are contracted because it's passively heated from solar hot water. And essentially what we're saying is that they can be used by small businesses or community programs as a bridge to permanent occupancy. Once that occurs, the mini building can be dismantled and taken to another site. So I'm gonna end with actually where we began. This is a 10-year-old project. It was the first project that Raquel and I collaborated on together before we launched Modu. It was for Art Basel, Miami Beach, the contemporary art fair. We designed a project in which performance artists could choose their own locations in the site without any formal stages. It was a kind of participatory environment that combined urban design with environment with the performers and with the audience. It had a series of rope towers. We used seven miles of rope hung from steel structures. Rope was a great material because it was both sustainable but also moves with the wind. It was a two-phase competition curated by the Public Arts Foundation Creative Time and organized by Art Basel, Miami Beach. What we were designing was basically the public phase for the private art fair. The wind changed with the environment and each night was a different experience. Sometimes gently swaying and sometimes dynamic movements. We used technology to basically calibrate the wind movement to the lighting, basically connecting human senses to the visual. And as an ending image, one important consideration for all these public installations is the afterlife as an environmental consideration. So from the beginning, we designed the concrete footings so that they'd be conducive to coral reefs. We had the footings sank into the ocean. We imagined the growing reincarnation of our project. And we worked on this project. The collaboration was with a marine biologist who helped us with this shrimp who was our first multi-species audience. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone and thanks for having me here. This is so much fun to be getting to share some work of my own and also to share with you later about this really exciting collaboration with Modu. My studio practice usually revolves around a combination of fine art, design and technology. Just gonna show a few works that are distinctly public art and ending with one that's on the boundary of public art and architecture. This project from 2014 that's called RadioSkeep is an array of old tripod, some of them 100 years old that were all discarded and then brought back to life by woodworkers, meaning me by myself. On top of these kind of discarded form of technology in a way are car radio antennas that themselves were also thrown out. FM radios were ubiquitous at one point, hardly use it all anymore as listening has become a more atomized experience. It used to be collective. Most people now have headphones, iPods, iPhones, et cetera. And this work that was in a sculpture park in Minnesota which is a rural area that does not have a population that's usually exposed to public art got a chance to and gets a chance with this park being open year round for free, the chance to see things they might not normally see. So this particular installation has a kinetic component. It's a type of kinetic sculpture. All of these antennas are the type that used to go up and down by themselves when you turn the car radio on that kids may not remember, but the older ones here do. So there were sensors at the bottom of each of these tripods that detected when people walked in around and through this sculpture and the antennas would go up in response to this motion. So you could hear the sound of the motors. You could walk around freely as you liked but it was quite a mysterious type of feeling. It wasn't intended to be and I don't think public art needs to be super user friendly or super clear. Especially when you have a population that usually doesn't encounter art like these bikers were some of my biggest fans. By walking around and first giving them something that has a kinetic element that draws your attention in and then perhaps if you spend more time looking at it you start figuring out it's responding to you. Are they watching you? Are they listening to you? Maybe they're broadcasting to each other. It's for some people a little eerie and uncanny for other people it's fun. But I think having those layers of experience in public art and in my own art practice is really important. Something that draws people in at first and then something that they can figure out more of if they spend more time of. So a second level of engagement and reward. And then maybe a third level they think more. These are obsolete technologies in some sense. Tripods are only used by camera professionals now. Soon they might not be needed at all. That kid doesn't get better than that. And if you look at it for longer than that you might also start thinking about how technology is shifting what we do with obsolete technologies and how they can be recombined and repurposed into something that's sort of alien or perhaps has a second life. And like this guy for example who was watching for long enough started to realize eventually that the antennas after they were all triggered to go up by his movement would then go down in the order that he had walked through them. So you'll see one of the antennas on the right starts to go down and he notices that. This is a totally different type of piece. This is from 2004 originally. This is the oldest piece of public art that I directly created. It was recreated about 10 years later in Montreal. This is another instance where people walking by at first had no idea what it was as is often the case with public art. So this was a kind of quasi ritual that I would ask strangers to engage in. Four people would stand in a circle and marks on the ground and take turns looking at each other for exactly 60 seconds each with no talking allowed. After 60 seconds a bell would ring and the viewer who's the guy with the band on his forehead would then look at the next person. Meanwhile, the point of view of the viewer is being projected behind him on a screen. He's actually wearing a tiny surveillance camera on his head. So part of it is about human connection and these cycles of first self-consciousness, nervousness, awkwardness that eventually give way to something that's more open perhaps. Everyone engages in a different way. Also, time passes very differently when you're staring at somebody. So I would interview people afterwards. How long did 60 seconds feel to you? For some people it felt like 10 minutes. But also whenever there's a video image and that was the other layer of the piece of people had more time to think about it, we're so entranced by a video image that I was also checking and the performance was about were people looking at the viewer or were they looking at the person being viewed or were they looking at what the viewer saw even though they could see the person right in front of them. And many people would stare at the screen even though the person was right there. But one of the amazing things about public art and this piece was having people who normally don't encounter her at all, don't encounter each other at all like this girl and these guys here, starting to open up with each other and share a moment that they might normally not have had. And this last project is a more recent piece. I had the amazing opportunity to work on a tiny island in the Arctic Circle in Norway. It really does look like this. This has been a fishing community for thousands of years and it's incredibly beautiful but there is some crumbling and derelict architecture there. So this was a participatory design process where we involved the community. This is basically everyone who lives in the town. So we were invited to come and make something new out of an unused space but rather than drop in as artists, we thought and knew you have to involve the local population. So we had students from three different countries presenting to panels of locals and locals themselves contributing their ideas about what they needed. Then getting everyone together to volunteer together to do the physical labor themselves. We turned an outdoor space into a kind of public shared space because they didn't have very many here. We did the unglamorous labor with them, refinishing buildings and just falling apart and we ended up making an outdoor space where people could gather. On this island there were only two places to gather. There was a bar and a cafe that was only open for three hours a week. So in the winter especially, it's dark, it's in the Arctic Circle so it's dark for sometimes three months at a time. So they would never go outside. So although there was this very user friendly and obvious layer of this kind of like public gathering space with a barbecue and whatever, we also wanted to create something a little bit weirder, more artsy so to speak on the inside that they can engage with in the winter during the dark months. So they went inside the building, there's a mysterious door with a yellow circle on it and inside there we made this intense light sauna. So we were using full spectrum light and crazy yellow saturated walls and it was just a place for people to hang out in the winter to be warm but also to reset their physiological systems because we know even in New York in the winter you can get so-called sad seasonal effective disorder from being in the dark too long. So being three months in the dark you really do need that kind of light. So like all public art, the best part is when people start to use it. These are people hanging out at the outdoor space and these are people hanging out in the indoor space just talking and feeling artificial sunlight on them. And that's really the best part of all public art is seeing the unexpected ways and the ways that people will become open with each other. Thank you. Is this on? Yeah, great, thanks. And to keep us honest, I'm keeping my phone here only for looking at the time. I am not checking my texts or anything. So thanks to all of you for just providing us with a bit of shared language around your own studio practices and how public design and art installations have played within those. I mean, one thing which is interesting is to look at your practice and you see so many of these ideas and themes around almost like weather related or this responsiveness to thermal conditions and the environment as well as some interactivity playing out. And then Eric and yours, you really see these themes of almost and often this technologically enabled interactivity although in the last project in particular, I was intrigued by kind of how lo-fi that was, which is cool. And I think what's interesting about all of that though is you see those themes collectively manifest within the Times Square project. So really just to begin before we dive into Times Square entirely, I just wanna ask each of these teams here why are public design and art installations important in your practice overall because you each have partaken in them in your own ways? So do you guys wanna start? Who and Raheli? I mean, I think for us, it plays an important role of building our research. We as a practice, we believe very much in research as a form of design and design as a form of research. So these installations, because they are inherently temporary, there are certain liberties that you can take in the process and we have a lot of our ideas have come through, not just designing them, but experiencing them and watching how people experience them in space. I'll add that in a way to rebellion against how the profession became indoor, right? Architecture is very clear boundaries of the wall and I just think that you wanna design beyond the wall to connect to the city. So it's not just about architecture and landscape and urbanism and how you build in psychology and sociology in a way, you want to create this cross-disciplinary way of experiencing the world and the artist part of it. Well, and I thought it was really interesting too when you guys were talking, who in particular you said, it also allows you room to speculate and why is that important as an architect and as a designer? I think especially for architects because so much of our discipline is about providing solutions, providing answers. It's, I think a lot of our training is that and often it's not only about asking questions, but knowing what is the right question to ask. So I think that's the importance of speculation, no work. Yeah, to refine the questions more than the solutions because yeah, I mean those drive then even better solutions ultimately. I mean, how about for you, Eric? I mean, talk about public art installations overall in your practice, you know. Yeah, I think that it's critical for any artist who works sometimes in a fine art context or a gallery context and sometimes in a public art context just to let people keep you honest. And by honest, I mean making sure that you are communicating an idea and a feeling that in a way that can be shared and can be experienced by anybody without unnecessary obfuscation and jargon on top of it. It doesn't mean that you need to oversimplify it. You can still have complex ideas, but in the rarefied gallery world, it's very easy to get lost in a dark, exclusive tunnel. So I think that when you make public art, you seeing how people react to it, you really get to the heart of the purpose of art which is to communicate a feeling and an idea and to make people think. And it shouldn't just be for a tiny percentage. Well, and also one thing that you said which I thought was really interesting is that oftentimes when a public comes upon a public art installation, they have no idea what they're looking at or what's expected of them. So I mean just even that immediate interaction is must be really interesting. I mean for your own understanding and practice as well. Yeah, definitely. And that's why I like the combination of art and design. Both of those disciplines which are traditionally kind of separate have things that they're really good at. And one of the things that design is very good at and interaction design in particular is looking very specifically and with a very clear eyes to how people actually see and react to something. Not how you wish they would as an artist or designer. And the same goes for architecture. Of course, you have to see, you design it, it looks beautiful in a model, but then you have to watch what do people actually do and you need to respond to that. There's the real world. So I wanna talk a bit then about what brings us all here tonight. And that of course is the Times Square Valentine Heart Design Competition which you can all see now until Sunday. It closes Sunday, right? It's crazy. It's been up for, I know, time flies. It's been up for three weeks. So you can go see it in the heart of Times Square in Father Duffy Plaza. So let's just even start from the beginning. I mean, how did the opportunity come to you guys? We were invited by Times Square Art and Cooper Youwitt to be a team that competes against others. For us, thinking about inclusivity, that was kind of the word that caught our attention with the brief. We thought that the process should be part of that kind of inclusive way of practicing. And we wanted to invite Eric Forman to be part of it. We worked before and we appreciate how he thinks about interactivity and doing public art. I think the idea of combining multiple perspectives is extremely important. In a sense, it enhanced democracy when you allow for multiple voices to be heard in the public sphere. So for us, it was very important to do it in that way. And we look at our fabricator, the new projects that are here and the structure engineering, whatever we work with as a collaborator in kind of making that kind of come to life. And the one thing too to clarify is that this is not an open competition. An open competition, particularly in architecture, most of the time like in ideas competition, which anyone is free to enter, this is a closed competition in which there is a select group that has been edited of architecture firms and designers that we wanted to approach. And thus there was an RFP, a Request for Proposal, then it was put out to you guys. And just tell us a little bit about how you even really come to rectify this submitting and participating in Request for Proposals. Do you ever participate in just open competitions at all and how do you balance that out with your practice? We do, we prefer to participate in invited competitions, obviously. Yeah. But we also participate in some open ones. I think it's important just as a practice and for the people in our team that we are doing some competitions every once in a while. It's kind of like mental gymnastics. And sometimes we just did one recently that we spent 10 days on. That's really intense and it's really invigorating, kind of like getting the blood going. And for this Times Square one, it was more closer to a month. So it's more like you have time, you test options. Like each one of them we do differently. But even if they're not one, which is right part of reality, I think it presented itself in a different project later on. So it's in a way to build ideas. Yeah. Yeah, I think that artists and designers, of course, deal with that all the time. You're often proposing stuff you don't know for a residency or for a public installation. You have to know, A, that not being selected doesn't mean failure. It means an excuse to push yourself to develop something else. And it's all R and D in a sense. So I think for both of us, probably when we look at competitions, we make a calculation in our head. Is this interesting? Will it push us to do something different? Also, if there's like one in a million chance, maybe not worth doing, but if it's anything like under one in a thousand, probably is worth doing. As long as there's something that is, that really pushes either a tool or a method, a way of thinking or a use of technology or a material, then it's worth it no matter what. So it becomes a very valuable part of your own practice and research that you really can push your thinking and experimentation and whatnot and potentially revisit some of it in a later project. So tell me about your own collaboration. How did you guys work together? Where was the complementarity? Is that even a word? I don't think it is. In general, between Fu and I, we have this rule where if we are not happy with the design, it does not come up. So we basically both critiquing one another, which I think is very important as our partnership. And I felt that in this kind of, when we work together with Eric Forman, I also felt in that sense that if Eric would not be appreciative of one direction or us, it would not go forward. So in that respect, we respected each other. But also what I do like about collaboration, it's additive process in the sense that one idea entangle with the other and builds up and it doesn't matter in the end of the day, it's kind of holistic collaboration. It's always a great sign when a project finally is released, if it was a collaboration, if you can't remember which parts you thought of, it was probably a good collaboration. It's all mixed together. We worked together so intimately in the whole proposal process. Every day almost we were meeting and going through ideas and iterating and discarding things and it was very organic. One thing I can remember though is that it occurred over three cities, which is the nature of the way that whatever our lives are with our contemporary practices. So it began in New York and then there was sometimes spent working remotely with each other in Rome and then to Tel Aviv. So like there's a lot of files going back and forth. A lot of time zone calculations. Time square is the crossroads of. And so ultimately you submitted the proposal, it was the winning submission. Then you begin moving into making this thing a reality and into fabrication and whatnot. I mean, tell us a little bit about that part of the process. That was, it's always exciting when it gets to that stage. Finding what we want of course is exciting. Then you're like, uh oh, we have to make it. We were really lucky to find new projects. Some of whose members are here today. A great local Brooklyn based fabricator. And they worked with us really hard. I think we pushed each other in a positive way to figure out how to solve these problems in a small amount of time that have to fit a very long and serious list of constraints. Of site, of public engagement, of safety, of engineering, and of course of concept and interactivity. And we added accessibility to all of that too. That's right. And I would add that we also like their cross-disciplinary way of thinking where some of the owner is an artist himself. So for us, again, this idea that everyone can do multiple things and think of different operation is important. I, for the idea of this surviving in Times Square for 300,000 people a day. So it needs to be very resilient. And for us as the design collaborators, for us it was really important to make it feel as thin and almost nothing in an environment that is in a way very tough. And for that I really, you know, it took a long time to understand how we make it work, which we're very happy with. I mean, that's what to me was so effective about it. And I would again encourage people to go out and see it. But I mean, just the ethereality of it. It's strange to say something kind of, you know, ethereal and almost quiet can exist in the heart of Times Square, but it really does. And I mean, really kind of, you know, the only kind of movement that you see on the piece is this reflection of Times Square back to you, which is what's interesting. Yeah, I think that was a guiding design principle for us. Even if it wasn't explicitly stated, but not just the balance of structure and air and people in the city, but also something that is both spectacular and subtle at the same time. That's, I'm actually kind of amazed that it worked as well as it did. It was five more days though. Yeah, there was this idea about, from the beginning, like how can we do something, and it's something that Rachele and I have been interested in for a very long time, which is about strength through air, or like strength versus resilience. So the steel structure is multiplied through thousands of members, but can literally, don't do this, but can be climbed on. And as a result, it's still 99% air, right? And that was for us a kind of driving principle. And as you walk around it, and we encourage people to walk around it, that's where you kind of experience the air. Yeah, so I guess in a way how we work together was really understanding the core values, which was interacting with the environment or amplifying the environment, and the idea of surrounding ourselves to that, and that kind of way dictated our choice, design choices. Well, and something else, which has really stuck with me, actually, both of you guys commented on this during your presentation. So, and I had to write them down, because I thought it was interesting. So, Foo, you were saying that, like, architecture is never complete without the people who are engaging with it, or maybe Rakhalia, you said it. And Eric, you were saying, again, this idea of, you know, when people are walking by something, you know, they never know necessarily what to expect or how to interact with it. So, I mean, I love this idea about how something really becomes what it's supposed to be with a user, with the public, with an audience. So, now that this piece, this installation, has been up for three weeks, how have people been using it? Has there been anything that surprised you in the life of this installation? Personally, I feel when you create something for the public, you surrender, and it's no longer yours. Someone else owns it, even if it's for five seconds engagement, or one minute engagement, so it's theirs. And yes, of course, they surprise you. It's just really fun to watch and see how people engage with it. And the longer you spend with the piece, as Eric was saying, the more layers are there to be revealed, which is for us part of the fun. My family's in Tel Aviv, and they've been watching live stream from Times Square, making sure the piece is okay, and the times I get this phone call, it's like, watch now, these guys are dancing. So, yeah, I have the monitor system at night, which is our gap between here and New York, watching. I think we really wanted people to interact with each other, not just with the installation itself. And we thought that would happen, but you can't predict until it's actually out there. And I was very happy to see just a hang back from the side and see people sharing it with each other, or sometimes explaining it to each other, which is amazing for public art, where each person kind of figures it out, gets something out of it, and then feels like they are the ambassador to the next round of viewers, and you see people pass it on, oh, look, it's this, it's about this, you have to stand in this spot, whatever. And it was interesting because we debated having what we called the sweet spot. There's one spot that you stand in front where all the mirrors are perfectly computationally aligned to form the heart. We thought at first it's gotta be a giant pink marker on the ground that everyone can see and nobody will miss, because there's a billion, billion people, and none of them have any time. But we ended up not needing that at all. People just, if they come from the side or from the back, they're interested in it, they start exploring, they see the reflections, they realize something's happening, either they figure out themselves or someone explains it and just wasn't necessary. That's really cool. I think that also has to do with the unique, both challenges, but also benefits of designing something for a time square. Over 300,000 people pass through the square in a day, so there's always going to be a bunch of people who are around it looking for the spot, because we've done work in other places where that density of people, you wouldn't have that communication. It's unique. It's interesting that it almost benefits from that. And the thing which I thought was really interesting for those of you who saw the video that was playing at the beginning, there was a bird. There was a bird that was in the center of it. I mean, a bird in time square. I don't know if I've ever really... Creating an ecosystem is really the highest... Multi-species work here. Shamp in the bird. There was a bird that literally found the center of the structure and where it cannot be reached from any direction and went to sleep in the middle of time square. I don't know how many people or species or animals will have that experience, but she found that perfect spot. Beautiful. So we only have a few minutes left. I want to open it up to our audience here. If anyone has a question for our guests this evening, please feel free. Raise your hand. We have a mic. Any questions? Okay, we have a couple. Here's one. So now that you guys have done a good amount of work with these public works and looking at this, do you have any favorites from other people or any other examples that have inspired you or that you think are really impressive and creative? Specifically for arts? Well, for public art, you're asking. Where are you? I'm a big fan of Olafur Eliasson. First of all, he works between art and architecture, which is appropriate for right now. Also, he combines science and art, which I think is amazing, but his experiences are sometimes completely immersive, really intense and quite complex, but almost anybody, as soon as they walk in, are already drawn in. No matter what they understand, it doesn't matter if they have an art background, a science background, or whatever. So he creates a spectacle that is accessible to all and also has incredibly complicated intellectual ideas underneath it. Well, I think art is an inspiration to me, period, in a sense that an artist is always part of society and outside of society and allows you for multiple perspectives, so I'm a big fan. My favorite is Michal Rovner, where she documents people in different periods of time and she multiplies them, make them very, very tiny as a video and project them into different architecture or archeological objects. And I just find, so she creates that extra small architecture through digital media, video, plus an object or space. She's a great inspiration. I have to interrupt you to say, this is when we knew our idea would work. That was our first test, we made a small matrix of mirrors, like, could it really make a shape? Could we really find the sky in Times Square and the naked cowboy ran up and did that? And we have his business card now. We had another question back here. My question is, did you guys start, when you guys started designing, did you guys start with the heart first or did you guys start with the specific element first? I think it depends, there are different options, design options. Some started with the heart and some did not, but I think that all of the options was about not making the heart and immediately found. I think that's something that connected all the ideas that we had together, which was this idea of drawing people into it. And it's something that we wanted to do to react maybe to do something differently than past years. And we use a lot of the word surprise or discover. I would say we started with stripping down our cynicism as New Yorkers. You know, you think about a heart or Times Square, it's not, I think you really need to understand the impact of Times Square, right? It is the heart of New York. It has a big message behind it. You can forget it because as New Yorkers, you maybe avoid the locomotion, the day-to-day locomotion there. And then hearts, how do you really connect to someone's heart? I think that's when you know that the piece is really working. So not the symbol of a heart, but really connect to something bigger, inclusive. For us, it was the collective heart in the sense that New York is really a place of everyone around the world. And you can feel the comfort of being yourself in the public sphere, among other, different than you. I find it very unique and rare. So for me, that was where I treat my cynicism and say, this is really important heart. And I have one last question. I'm interested in this idea of the civic value of public design and art installations. I mean, what do you think is the value in our shared landscape? I mean, number one is, I think obvious, but needs to be repeated constantly, which is that art is essential for civic life. Whether it's rural or urban, and providing art for free is just fundamental to engaging in a society. You need to have those moments of not just imagination, that something is outside of the ordinary. Even if it's troubling, it should be something that takes you outside of your normal perspective. So for public art, especially, I mean, that is its mission, is to give art to everybody. So I think it's critical for the life of any place. Yeah, I definitely agree with what Eric is saying. I think that for us, with the project there, what art can do in the civic space is reframe how we experience that space. And I think that for us, one of the great pleasures of Heart Squared was that it's not just about the piece, it's about how that piece recalibrates and reimagines this very large urban space. And one thing that I think that we were actually also, you know, this idea of surprise, we were also surprised by how that all the mirrors fragment the billboard. So you no longer are seeing the advertising the billboard, but just snippets of color, and it's constantly changing. And it's like basically the essence of Times Square abstracted, right? One last comment I would say that 87% of our times is spent indoors, which is privatized, especially super privatized, especially in New York City. So we have so little time in the public sphere that it's actually free. And in that sense, public art or emphasizing how this space of the outdoor is extremely important to democracy as a sense of a sphere that as a public we can enjoy and we can set the rules of engagement is really important. Fantastic. So with that, we actually are gonna have to wrap up our conversation. I want to thank our guests for being here this evening. I wanna thank all of you for joining us. And the museum does have a couple exhibitions that are opening on Friday. We have another exhibition that's opening on March 13th. So do come back and visit us. And with that, thank you. Thank you to everyone. Thank you to everyone. Thank you to everyone. Thank you to everyone. Thank you to everyone. Thank you to everyone. Thank you.