Each night, as dusk descends on Rochester, one of the most illuminating new trends in urban planning emerges: A city of light. A skyline that over the last few years has increasingly seen gray stone and metal give way to vibrant color. And the most-spectacular display yet will soon make its debut.
Jim Sanborn may be the most dangerous man in art. A conceptual thinker who has created precise, and apparently functional, reproductions of a particle accelerator and an atomic bomb from the dawn of the nuclear age. “Subterfuge, and discovery of things hidden, that’s kind of what I do, ” he says.
Ground Zero for Sanborn’s next commission is the Memorial Art Gallery. The new piece is certainly not as potentially explosive as some of his previous works. Nevertheless, when the switch is thrown for the first time this spring,
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“This is sort of a phenomena, ” James Smith, Rochester's communications director, says of these splashes of light on cityscapes. “It offers a sense of place. All around the world, there are really dynamic art installations, some temporary, some permanent. LED lights are making that more and more possible.
“An attractive and innovative downtown is how you lure people to give downtown another look, or a first look, as a place to live and work and develop.”
The phenomena has been in place here for several years now. Longer, if taking into account downtown’s Liberty Pole, which by mayoral decree is holding onto its retina-searing holiday lighting longer than usual. But the rest of Rochester’s skyline lightscape is far more subtle. The gray topmost corners of Xerox Tower, the city’s tallest building at 30 stories, were trimmed in a frosty blue last week, a brilliant crimson this week. Spotlights illuminate the peaks of the 20-story Legacy Tower and the 14-story art deco Times Square Building and its distinctive “The Wings of Progress.” Bright lines define the top edges of One East Avenue and Tower 280, with the former a revolving color scheme. The white facades of both buildings, overlooking Parcel 5 on East Main Street, were the targets of laser images during last fall’s Rochester Fringe Festival.
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As Smith notes, “All of that kind of times in as we’re positioning ourselves in the photonics industry, which is all about light.”
Perhaps the most-dramatic lighting in the city belongs to the Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County’s Rundel Building. Perched on the edge of the Genesee River, between the Broad and Court Street bridges, it enjoys easy visibility from many vantage points. Run by a computer program, as with most of the displays throughout the city these are LED lights: Light-emitting diodes, derived from photon energy.
“Some are tricky to maintain because they’re right on the river, ” says Sally Snow, communications director of the Rochester Public Library. Despite the danger to the maintenance crew, since February 2013 the building has shimmered with a cornucopia of colors. “We theme them toward holidays, and a lot of times we’ll take suggestions from organizations, ” Snow says. One of the first displays was red, for lymphedema, a condition of fluid retention and tissue swelling. Next week will be green for the 100th anniversary of Girl Scout cookies. June is purple for Alzheimer’s and brain awareness.
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“Red for heart disease, pink for breast cancer awareness, ” Snow says. “Purple for Prince, we figured for the national treasure he was. Events like the Amerks in the playoffs…”
“The lighting of buildings is one thing, ” says Memorial Art Gallery Director Jonathan Binstock. “The Empire State Building, the Freedom Tower in New York City. Or the Times Square Building in Rochester, the Rundel for sure. But we’re not just lighting our building, the building is already illuminated. What we’re doing is creating a new work of art, using the façade of the 1913 Building as a canvas. It’s a work of art, it’s not just illumination.”
Sanborn’s done about 15 of these light installations around the country, “generally using the history or something about the institution or the city or the environment where the city is located, ” he says. With
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The artist creates through research, acquiring original lab equipment, or building his own components from the blueprints. Sanborn refers to his larger museum exhibitions as “science-based installations.” When he built a copy of the first large-particle accelerator — a 5-million volt, 28-foot-tall collection of sprawling polished spheres and spiraling copper tubing — Sanborn used it to split an atom, just as the original had done in 1939.
Naturally, he then re-created the first atomic bomb, using someone’s backyard birdbath and “specs from Russian documents stolen from the U.S., since the original plans were still secret, ” he says. “It’s the most-accurate replica ever made of the internal workings.”
, can be seen on the front lawn of Intellectual Ventures Inc., in Belleview, Washington. That’s a technology-development company co-founded by Nathan Myhrvold, one of the early Microsoft geniuses. And last week Sanborn was on his way to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, for the opening of his exhibit
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, which attempts to blow the whistle on the forging of stone antiquities from Cambodia and Thailand by using the very same processes used by the forgers. These are expensive and time-consuming projects. Sanborn pays for them with commissions such as
, installed in a plaza outside of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. The main feature of the installation is four copper sheets, each perforated with a separate encryption written by Sanborn. The public, and the CIA’s top encryption specialists, have been invited to solve the codes. Three of them have been broken since it was first installed in 1990. The forth remains an enigma.
“I still get a couple of people a day making guesses, ” Sanborn says. “I have absolutely no math skills to do what I do. It’s my end-around to the system. Ironically, it’s ended up in every algebra book in high schools.”
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Binstock was curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., when he first worked with Sanborn. That was 2003, when
. Words documenting the discovery of silver nitrate in the making of images on film, the founding of Bausch & Lomb and Eastman Kodak and “early Chinese scientists and the camera obscura, where it was first developed and observed, ” he says. “Col. Nathaniel Rochester and his cohorts establishing Rochesterville, when Rochester was basically a group of trees next to a river.
“Susan B. Anthony’s voting record. At the time, photography wasn’t really a popular medium. But there’s a verbal description of the trial, her appearance and her demeanor, at her trial for voting illegally.”
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will also feature a Frederick Douglass quote on the importance of the camera. “He considered it the great leveler of all, because the images are genuine, they are true, they are precise, ” Sanborn says. “Anybody can have a photograph taken, poor or rich or whatever culture they are from. He regarded the camera as a tremendous tool.”
High-pressure water jets have already been used to cut these words into metal sheets, which are now at Sanborn’s studio on an island in Chesapeake Bay. Those sheets will be mounted on two 8-foot-tall cylinders positioned in front of the 1913 Building. The cylinders themselves will be set on 9-inch-tall pedestals, as protection from snow plows and skateboarders.
The light source within the two columns is an arrangement he’s designed himself, and is a secret, Sanborn says. He’s irritated by a similar projection installation in Toronto that he says uses the technology that he developed.
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Binstock’s estimate of when this goes into place is before June. “They want to do it in spring, ” Sanborn says. “I’m not sure what spring means to you guys.”
has been, except for the handful of Latin, Chinese and Onondaga characters that will accompany the mostly English text. Nor will the story of Nathaniel Rochester and the history of photography rival
“It wasn’t necessarily legal to re-create the internal workings of an atomic bomb, ” Sanborn concedes, before defiantly defending his right to do so after tracking down those remains of an early atomic bomb’s outer shell being used as a birdbath. “There are things in the Constitution that allow freedom of speech.
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