Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight.

Midnight Moment is visible on screens from 49th – 42nd Streets in the Times Square bowtie. Prime viewing locations are Duffy Square between 46th and 47th Streets and Military island between 43rd and 44th Streets.

World-renowned artist William Kentridge combines drawing, writing, film, performance, music, theater, and collaborative practices to create works of art that are grounded in politics, science, literature and history — all the while maintaining a space for contradiction and uncertainty.

To an extent never before realized, William Kentridge, working with video editor Janus Fouché, has customized his Midnight Moment, To What End? (2019), for the precise dimensions and location of each of the electronic billboards that participate in the program, creating an immersive and various experience for viewers on the sidewalks and plazas of Times Square.

To What End? incorporates text and imagery from a chamber opera Kentridge conceived and created, Waiting for the Sibyl (2019). In his signature film style that captures the act of creating, erasing and revising his images, he animates trees, leaves, birds, Rorschach-like blots, people bearing strange loads, and a central image from Roman mythology — the Cumean Sybil, portrayed as a dancing woman. All these images are hand drawn or painted by Kentridge across the rapidly turning pages of dictionaries and classical literature.

Texts running across the images are taken from the libretto of Waiting for the Sibyl and were originally drawn from a variety of sources, including poems and proverbs from around the world, as well as phrases the artist found in his own notebooks. Each in some way addresses the question: “To what end?”

To What End? alludes to the myth of the Cumean Sibyl, described in Virgil’s Aeneid as a prophetess who wrote fortunes on oak leaves, which would subsequently be scattered by the wind. Even if a visitor could catch a leaf, they would never know if the fortune written on it was their own fate, or someone else’s. The turning pages of Kentridge's animation stand in for Sibyl’s unattainable leaves. The interwoven texts serve as potential fortunes for the viewers in Times Square, exploring the feelings of hope and foreboding that surround the search for one’s destiny.

“Insofar as concern about our future is universal, I hope that there will be some resonance for people seeing the piece, even if the meanings are not explicit. Of course, the invitation to put images in this extraordinary public space, with an unpredictable and diverse audience, is an almost irresistible provocation and a great opportunity.”

—William Kentridge

To What End? is courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, and is presented by Times Square Arts in partnership with Gallery Met at The Metropolitan Opera on the occasion of its production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, directed by Kentridge and premiering December 27, 2019 through January 22, 2020. Video editing for To What End? is by Janus Fouché.