Photography: Flatiron NoMad Partnership and NYC DOT ART Presents “Winter Glow,” Iregular’s CONTROLNOCONTROL 12/21/23

Photography: Flatiron NoMad Partnership and NYC DOT ART Presents “Winter Glow,” Iregular’s CONTROLNOCONTROL 12/21/23

The Flatiron NoMad Partnership, founded back in 2006, is a nonprofit organization and business improvement district that serves the businesses, people and places that help make The Flatiron District and NoMad arguably two of Manhattan’s most iconic and authentic destinations. Both neighborhoods are the home of a range of retailers, employers, cultural and educational institutions and a thriving residential community, making it a bustling center of activity. 

The Partnership’s purpose is to serve to a dedicated steward and supporter in the district by maintaining a clean and safe environment; spearheading area improvement projects; and marketing and championing the diverse business and retail options in the historic neighborhood. 

The New York City Department of Transportation’s Art Program (NYC DOT Art), a division of NYC’s Department of Transportation, has partnered with community-based not-for-profit organizations and professional artists to present temporary public art on NYC DOT property across the five boroughs for up to 11 months — producing over 400 temporary artworks across the city since 2008. A variety of public spaces serve as canvases and spaces for temporary arts, including sidewalks, fences, triangles, medians, bridges, jersey barries, step streets, public plazas and pedestrianized spaces serving as canvases and spaces for temporary arts that include color murals, dynamic projections and eye-catching sculptures that light up the streets of the city’s five boroughs. 

Iregular, is a Montréal-based digital art studio founded back in 2010 by Colombian-Canadian digital artist Daniel Iregui, that creates audiovisual installations, large-scale sculptures, architectural projects and scenographies with a focus on interactive and immersive experiences. The studio currently has a catalog of over 50 interactive works that have toured over 30 countries. 

Their work is at the crossroads between art and technology, frequently experimenting with geometry, light, sound, mathematics, algorithms, communication protocols and artificial intelligence. The studio also develops its own proprietary technologies. 

The studio works with the infinite and random combinations produced by interactive systems that the viewer/audience influences and transforms. Their goal to is to always spark curiosity and wonder through a dialogue between the public and the living artwork, an experience that varies with each different personal point of view. Interaction is the core of it all. The relationship between the viewer/audience and the particular piece finalizes the artwork and gives it meaning. 

These three distinct groups have collaborated together to present Iregular’s CONTROL NO CONTROL, a large-scale, interactive installation on the Flatiron North Plaza, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, Broadway and West 23rd Street. The luminous and interactive installation, which will be on view from November 30, 2023 until January 1, 2024 and simultaneously serve as a visible landmark in the heart of Manhattan’s Flatiron and NoMad neighborhoods — and as the centerpiece of Winter Glow, the Flatiron NoMad Partnerships three-week series of interactive, pop-up programming that invites New Yorkers and visitors to celebrate the season through light, art, games, music and dance. 

Specifically conceived for big open spaces, CONTROL NO CONTROL is a large-scale, interactive installation in the form of a giant LED cube that reacts to everything and everyone that touches it, and every moment performed on its surface. Streamlined patterns and generative sound emerges as every interaction occurs. Designed to allow up to 48 people to participate at the same time, the experience is extremely intuitive, leading to quick audience engagement and prolonged interactions. 

A sort of socio-digital experiment, the piece explores the relationship between participants and interactive installations. It tests the artwork’s ability to intrinsically “instruct” and delegate the final audiovisual result to the audience that ends up gaining control of the pieces. Created in 2011 in Montreal for Igloofest, it has since been presented over 35 times around the world, and the piece has revealed that people all over the glove tend to behave the same way around the cube, and all seemed to spend a lot of time engaging with it, and each other. This in turn, suggests the ability for the artwork to equally influence the public, highlighting the back-and-forth blurred nature of control.

Winter Glow closed out its programming with a celebration of the winter solstice with a partnership with the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) that featured kaleidoscopes — where you could take some of the more unique selfies around. And you can try curling with a set up broughtI over by the folks at Brooklyn Curling Center.

Although it was quite cold, it was fun for all.