FINAL Presentation #WishingLamp

Project Report “Wishing Lamp”

Curating Public Narrative

Project Report “Wishing Lamp”

By: Kevin Ko (Kwang Min Ko), Mackenzie Lestan, Reven, SeonAe Moon

Introduction

Our group seeks to install our “Wishing Lamp” structure in three chosen public locations, Washington Square Park, Bryant Park, and Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City. Our group consist of four Parsons students, one senior student majoring in Photograph, one senior student majoring in Integrated Design, and one senior and one junior Design Management students. We have worked in multiple phases to develop for our design for public art installation project. This report is final proposal before we install our art project in three public locations for a period of time in the future winter.

Objectives

The main objective of our project is to give people a comfort zone and to create a unified environment that neighbors and visitors from the entire world can think and express their feelings in public space. We have chosen three different park locations, which have different demographics resulting different and unique outcome for each locations. We will install three large lamp sculptures. The design of the lamp is a simple, large rectangle shape lamp has light wires around, similar to a Japanese traditional lamp. The color of the lamp will change in certain setup time, which can change the mood of the environment depending on the colors. Our group wants our installed art project to create a space within a space, for people to freely interact and express their thinking with our installed lamp structure. People can use wishing tag papers to jot down their wish that will be installed around our structure. We want to observe how each different park locations with variety of demographics have different voices and different expression.

Description of art locations

At the chosen three different locations, we want a wide range of diversity for the responses we receive from our wishing lamp installation. With three different locations, they consist of different demographics. The locations we chose for our instillation are Bryant Park, Washington Square Park, and Dumbo (park between the brooklyn bridge and manhattan bridge). Bryant Park’s demographic is business people and workers, Washington square park has a demographic of students and the demographic of Dumbo is populated by residents. With our project we also have a fixed demographic which is visitors, because with being in New York, tourists are a constant element everywhere in the city.

1. Washington Square Park

Location: Foot of Fifth Avenue, bordered by Waverly Place, University Place, MacDougal Street

Building Near by: Most of the buildings surrounding the park now belong to New York University, but many have at one time served as homes and studios for artists. Some of the buildings have been built by NYU while others have been converted from former uses into academic and residential buildings.

Neighborhood: It is a landmark in Manhattan in the neighborhood of Greenwich Village as a meeting place and center for cultural activity. During the daytime, the park is always packed of people who want to enjoy the sunshine, take a walk with a dog and hang out. There are many restaurants surrounding by the park, so many people walk through or visit the park in evening, too.

2. Brooklyn Bridge Park (Dumbo)

Location: Furman St, Water St, John St, Old Fulton St, Main St. It’s end of the Brooklyn Bridge

Building Near by: There is Brooklyn Bridge and Wall Street office buildings nearby and residential building.

Neighborhood: The park offers breathtaking view of Lower Manhattan and numerous recreational facilities such as playgrounds, basketball courts, and sports fields. The park attracts tons of Tourists and New Yorkers everyday because it is under Brooklyn Bridge and it offers great view of Manhattan. Neighbors come to the park to break away from their busy lives.

3. Bryant Park

Location: Fifth and Sixth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets

Building Near by: Salmon Tower, W.R. Grace Building, Bryant Park Building, 1095 Avenue of the Americas, Bryant Park Studio Building, American Radiator Building, Knox Hat Building, The New York Public Library

Neighborhood: Bryant Park is filled with office workers on sunny weekdays, city visitors on the weekends, and revelers during the holidays. One of the biggest features of the park is a large lawn that is turned into skate rink during the winter. There are large trees surrounding the park blocking the view of congested New York City view, which creates comfortable public environment for exhausted workers and pedestrian.

Collaboration with Artists

Lights are not only the source to see something clear in the dark. We feel and absorb lights through our eyes and skin when we are exposed to it. The light has power to fill space and fill our emotions. Since we create the wishing lamp to observe the expression of feelings and thoughts in public space, we can collaborate with similar artworks, which have used light in art forms such as James Turrell and The Museum of Feeling Glade®.

James Turrell is a well-known visionary artist, who uses lights to change perception of medium and objective. He uses lights to create a space, which is affected perception of what audiences see and what they feel. He shapes lights and creates new spaces that people can have different attention of the space in a simple space. We can install his artworks at our three different locations to collect ideas and feelings of audiences. The audiences, who live in the areas where they are used to see in their daily life, can have different eyes in familiar landscape. They will have new feelings about ordinary space, and it will result different and unique outcomes. They will express and share their new experience of the spaces on our wishing lamp, and the messages will be inspired people who want to escape their routine.

The Museum of Feelings by Glade® is offering experience to change their feelings as entering different rooms in the exhibition. The exterior of each room has different colors and scents to change moods of audiences; exhilarated, carefree, joyful, invigorated, worried, calm and optimistic. We can create two different wishing lamps with basic color lightings at the entrance and the exit. Audiences can write down how their feelings and thoughts are changed before and after they visit the exhibition. It would be shared and remembered with other audiences, and we can observe different voices and expression in various demographics.

After two exhibitions are finished, we will create a book that combines the tags from the wishing lamp, so people can share ideas of the experience. The book will also help the visitors to remember what they feel and what they have thought.

Collaborating with all different artworks will be extended main objective of our project, which is to offer a comfort zone and to create shared environment with neighbors and visitors that can express their feelings in public space.

Financial Summary

Part A. This is the list and price of our materials for creating lamp.

Materials	Price	Explanation
¾” x 8 BIRCH PLYWOOD CANADIAN (34BIR)	$20.00 x 6 = $120.00	Need to cut in piece, this part is going to be height of the lamp, so pieces of 67 inch(need to stick two piece together after cutting. 12 pieces for 3 lamp, one large piece give 4 part which is two large side piece.
½ 4 X 8 CANADIAN BIRCH PLYWOOD (12BIR)	$25.00 x 6 = $150.00	Going to be the base part 27.5 x 6 x 4 (three each bases top and bottom for three lamp)
lederTEK Decorative Solar Christmas Lights White 200 Led 72ft 8 Modes Fairy String Light	$22.00 x 9 = $198.00	The solar solar light that is waterproof we need 3 for each lamp to cover up the 27.5 x 67 x 27.5 inch lamp
Blick Soft White Hang Tags x 300	$4.00 x 10 = $40.00	30 packs for each container and we are planning to have 100 tags for each lamp
Total	= $508.00	Approximate total price for creating 3 lamps

• We have no labor cost because we will be making and cutting the pieces from school, the drilling machines and nails will be provided by school.

• We will be getting our wood materials in Prince Lumber for our lamp, we are going to use plywood for our project. In our financial report, it is the serial code of the plywood we are going to purchase for the lamp. The cost and amount of plywood is going to be the price of  three lamps. We choose plywood is one of the best durable material for creating sturdy structure and is very cheap. However it is week at water, so we have to careful of water overtime, however since our project is going to be approximately displayed for 2 weeks, the water won’t be problems.

404 W 15th St, New York, NY, 100, (212) 777-1150

• The light source is purchased from Lighting & Beyond, and the lights will run in solar energy and it will be weather proof so we don’t most likely have to worry about light shutting off because of dead battery. The light will not be an issue unless the light we purchase itself  has technical difficulty.

35 W 14th St, New York, NY, 10011, (212) 929-2738

• The wish tags are from staples, one pack contains 30 tags so we need approximately 10 packs to have 300 tags, 100 tags for each locations.

Part B. The cost of installing our lamp in different parks  

To install our wishing lamp at public parks in New York City, we need to contact to the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation to reserve a specific areas in a park. There is processing fee, which is $ 25 for each event, and it cannot be waived or returnable. In addition, it will take 21-30 days to process permit requests. To install our wishing lamps, there are extra different costs in each park. To preserve areas in advance, we can apply special events permit online (https://nyceventpermits.nyc.gov/Parks) or in person at one of borough permit offices, which are located in Central Park for Manhattan, Prospect Park for Brooklyn. We cannot reserve any parks in major holiday weekends; during that time, parks will be remained into first-come, first-served system for public use.

	Washington Square Park	Brooklyn Bridge Park	Bryant Park
Under 25% of Designated Area	$ 1800	$ 600	$ 600

Removal

With the name tags that are being collected on the three lamps, as a group we will be putting the tags into a book. With the lamp structure, we will be responsible for hiring professional demolition company to remove the three lamps in the three different locations. The lamp structure can be trashed after, but we will be collecting the wishing tags written by people, for our final process. However we do not have use of lamp anymore, therefore we decided to trash it but since we don’t damage the park during the cleaning process. We decided to hire professional demolition company. The price of lamp deconstruction will be $80 for each three lamps, making total of $240 to demolish all the lamps.

Nuza Home Improvement Corp, booking available in Home Advisor.

Conclusions

The total pricing of our project, $508 (Materials) + $3000 (Location fee) + $240 (Demolish fee). $3748 is the approximately pricing of our total project cost.

Our main goal of the project is to create a unique comfort zone to the people visiting the park, with using our light structure, “Wishing lamp”. People can freely express their emotions or even write about their future plans or dream on our structure using the wishing tags provided by us. At the end of the project, we wanted to create art piece to memorate our project. We decided to create a book using wishing tags we collected from each of our lamp. We will examine and sort our wishing tags in certain themes that we think it's suitable for the wishing tags. For example, in theme, “Dream” section of the book will include people’s wishing tag who wrote about what they want in future or literally their dream last night. We want to share people’s voice others, who have interacted with our project, which this possibly could spread the words for our future creating bigger, “Wishing Lamp”, project after our first launch.