leo villareal

Light it up: Epic LED show to wrap SF Bay Bridge in swirls and stars

With the flip of a switch Tuesday night, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, already known as one of the world's most amazing bridges, will undergo an epic transformation.

Starting tomorrow evening, anyone looking at the San Francisco side of the Bay Bridge at night will be wowed by the ever-changing swirls, bursts, star fields, and other patterns of the Bay Lights Project, the world's largest LED art installation.

Created by artist Leo Villareal, the project features 25,000 1-inch LEDs strung for 1.8 miles along the bridge's cables that together make up the pixels on what … Read more

Behind the scenes with the world's largest LED art project

SAN FRANCISCO--I'm standing behind Leo Villareal, watching the well-known artist calibrate settings in the software running on his screen. Each time he moves a slider, one of the world's largest art installations -- mounted on one of the world's most-famous landmarks -- changes in an instant.

It's a gorgeous evening on the Embarcadero, San Francisco's eastern waterfront, with the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge dominating the landscape in front of us, and a near-full moon doing its best to overcome the typical evening fog cover. Lights from the city, and from Oakland on the other side of the bay reflect brilliantly in the water. And with just the most subtle adjustments in his custom-designed software, Villareal makes thousands of LEDs strung out over the 1.8 mile-long western span of the bridge almost instantaneously change what they're doing, and how they're interacting with each other. … Read more

'Bay Lights' would create curtain of light a mile and a half long

The Golden Gate Bridge turned 75 this past weekend, with a spectacular fireworks show to celebrate.

Unfortunately, some of us were home with spring colds and could only listen mournfully to the endless booming while imagining the historic show that was passing us by. Luckily, though, there's another bridge birthday happening in the Bay Area, with a related light-based extravaganza which, if all goes according to plan, should be pretty amazing -- and pretty hard to miss.

As our friends at Wired noted recently, artist Leo Villareal and his supporters want to honor the neighboring Bay Bridge on its 75th birthday by festooning it with 25,000 individually programmable white LED lights. "The Bay Lights" project will create a gigantic, shimmering "light sculpture" that responds to environmental stimuli such as the underlying water, the overriding traffic, and the surrounding weather, and will remain in place for two years.… Read more

When LEDs and math equal high art

reporter's notebook SAN JOSE, Calif.--Can math make art? Can logic inform patterns and sequences that are visually compelling? Is light a medium suitable for the artistic canvas? Clearly, the answer to all those questions is yes, and people like James Turrell and M.C. Escher have offered years of proof of that.

But now anyone in or near Silicon Valley has a chance to take in a fantastic collection of light works by the New York-based artist Leo Villareal at the San Jose Museum of Art (see videos below). And having gotten a chance to see the show … Read more