Whitney Museum

Allard van Hoorn

Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine

22 May - 21 Jun 2017

Screenshot of Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine at sunrise.
ALLARD VAN HOORN
Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine
22 May – 21 June 2017

Allard van Hoorn's Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine visually and verbally translates the sky above the Whitney Museum. Using the names of the Dutch Boy house paint colors as a “haiku engine,” it generates site-specific poetry for day and night. At sunrise and sunset, a screenshot of a patch of sky above the Whitney is taken from a webcam view of the Manhattan skyline. The image is then pixelated to extract a range of colors, which are matched to swatches of the Dutch Boy colors, known for their poetic naming lexicon. For 30 seconds at sunrise and sunset, whitney.org is tiled with these colored paint swatches and their accompanying labels, representing the colors of the sky at that moment. The project uses the sky as a free zone of imagination and draws attention to the perception of our environment.

Allard van Hoorn is a sound, installation and performance artist creating choreographies and musical scores for architecture, scenographies for the built environment and scripts for investigating our relationships to public and architectural spaces. His work has been shown at institutions and events including the 7th Bucharest Biennale; 1st Yinchuan Biennale; 6th Marrakech Biennale; 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial; 2nd Tbilisi Triennial; 12th Biennal de la Havana; 2013 Shenzhen / Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture; 2011 Gwangju Design Biennial; ISCP, NYC; Rosenthal CAC, Cincinnati; de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Storefront for Art and Architecture; NYC, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Sunrise / Sunset Haiku Engine is part of Sunrise/Sunset, a series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org to mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day.