Art festival under Brooklyn Bridge
Going to Brooklyn for the first time for the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival was an refreshing experience. Artists from all over New York came together to showcase their art at the festival over the last weekend of September. Walking around the neighborhood as I exit the subway station I was blown away by the fact that art was everywhere, on the streets, buildings, sidewalks, parks, and even in the river. I had the chance to visit galleries and open studios and saw many different kinds of art, including interactive, sculptures, paintings, films, and photography. Interactive art especially captured my attention out of all the others. Changing art forms from two dimensional flat images to three dimensional touchable objects makes art fun and interactive while involving viewers more into the world of art.
One interactive art that stood out the most for me was ‘A’ space’s “Cocktail in Cardboard”. The art was interactive in such way that visitors were invited to join the process of building boxes out of cardboards as they enter the exhibit. I thought they strategically put boxes everywhere to increase the involvement of visitors. When I walked in I saw cardboards sitting on the floor waiting to be made into boxes and to be stacked with others that were previously built into a tunnel. There was another box that hanged from the ceiling which twirls while flashy colors were projected onto it from the side. Other than seeing boxes all over the place I also noticed that the space was purposely made to be relaxing through soft music and the gloomy setting with diffused and dimed neon lighting on the walls. People would feel more comfortable to play and interact with art in that kind of environment.
Those boxed stacked together both horizontally or vertically were connected and cut to form a passage where visitors can crawl through. This is the part where visitors can get more involved into the art because of the three dimensions of the materials. Visitors can experience what it feels like inside a passage made from boxes. As the description of the exhibit put it, this art provides visitors with an “Interactive playspace filled with 150 cardboard boxes, cocktails, and you!” I felt like I was going back in time to when I was a kid as I crawled inside the small cardboard boxes. I was worried in the beginning that I would be stuck inside one of the boxes and someone would have to cut the box open, but luckily that didn’t happen. It was actually fun to explore each of those paths made from boxes leading to one another and moving towards different directions as I crawled through the “mini maze”.
The experience inside the box was surprisingly amusing. Once I entered the first box and started my discovery of what exactly was inside, I began hearing different kind of sounds and seeing colors and patterns on the walls of the boxes. Sounds were transmitted from cups or different objects attached to various boxes to create different effects in tone or voice. Lighting from the outside was projected on walls inside the boxes through holes and shapes previously carved that were covered in layers of colored plastic materials. These slight adjustments made on the boxes created a very special experience for each of the visitors that crawled through the passage.
Artists at the festival were able to experiment and test their creative ideas in the pubic while sharing with visitors their unique artworks. From ‘A’ space’s presentation of cardboard transforming to structures of tunnel, I experienced how artists can use simple materials such as cardboards, to create an interactive art and provide fun experiences for all individual viewers. The cardboard art was greatly enhanced by the artists through the manipulation of colors and visual effects on the boxes. Art can take different forms and people sometimes forget simple things can be made to something entirely different with a little addition of sounds and images. Interactive and fun art can also bring people back to childhood and add new memories as well.