Via
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.
New York-based, Venezuelan-born interdisciplinary artist Maria Constanza Ferreira bridges visual art and scientific study as an Artist-in-Residence and Research Assistant at New York University's Department of Chemistry. Using a range of resources from microscopes to satellites, she explores patterns found across nature, from microscopic crystals to large-scale topographies, and manipulates them into new and dreamy landscapes.
Ferreira’s film Via (2018) ascends from seemingly endless roads from around the world to abstracted, aerial views of the Earth. As Ferreira knits together vivid and colorful satellite images, the patterns take on a frenzied pace and movements reminiscent of natural systems such as blood flow, flight patterns, and atom vibrations.
Fascinated with how technological innovations have changed human perception of the planet, Ferreira consulted with a remote sensing scientist specializing in satellite imagery to learn about large-scale geological formations. She then gathered and sorted thousands of images from the Unites States Geological Survey Database, Google Earth, and Google Street View, stitching them into a rapid-fire animation. The dramatically saturated vistas in Via inspire a new sense of wonder towards natural beauty, while paradoxically, Ferreira’s digital manipulation speaks to how human activity is altering the planet.
“By displaying Via in this quintessential urban landscape, I hope for Times Square’s audience to reflect upon how organic and inorganic systems shape the design of the surface of the planet, and to think about the role of lenses and screens as interpreters and descriptors of the world.”
— Maria Constanza Ferreira
A Portuguese citizen born in Venezuela, Maria Constanza Ferreira (b. 1994, Caracas, Venezuela) is an artist practicing across a range of media including video, photography, and interactive installation. In 2017, Ferreira earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design as a double major in Film/Animation/Video and Graphic Design. Her work has screened internationally at places such as Slamdance Film Festival, IndieLisboa, GLAS Animation Film Festival, Exploratorium: The Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception Screening, SFO Museum, and the Imagine Science Film Festival. She is currently progressing her work in the field of Chemical Crystallography as an Artist-in-Residence at New York University's Department of Chemistry in the laboratory of the Kahr Research Group.
Photos courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for Times Square Arts.