Displayed on over 90 billboards every midnight in July, Nancy Baker Cahill’s Slipstream 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.

“Slipstream Times Square, like other videos in this series, dwells in the murky territories of consciousness but does so here multiplied, at scale, for a collective public audience. This artwork gestures toward the organic, as a simulated fiction of botanical and biomorphic forms. Spread across millions of LED nodes, It offers a familiar referent with no natural analog.”
— Nancy Baker Cahill.

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.