The Mill City Times Interview: Sarah Peters, Director, Northern Lights.mn

Article by Becky Fillinger

Later this month, Illuminate the Lock returns to the St. Anthony Falls lock wall. It’s a collaboration between many non-profit and government groups to tell the Mississippi River’s story using images, sound and lights. We spoke to Sarah Peters, Director of Northern Lights.mn, one of the event’s partners, about art and technology in public spaces. 

Sarah PetersQ:  How did you get interested in art in public spaces?

A:  It is hard to pinpoint a precise moment or project, but I would say I was inspired to start thinking about interactive art in public spaces from the early days of the Art Shanty Projects. Some friends and I built and hosted a shanty for two winters on Medicine Lake. The experience of welcoming people to our shanty and watching a community of artists grow around the project was very energizing. At that time I was working in the Education and Community Programs department of the Walker Art Center doing exhibition-related programming for adults. Towards the end of my decade there, my colleagues and I launched a project called Open Field that encouraged visitors to become programmers of the green lawn outside of the museum. After a summer of programming outside and in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and seeing how people brought a more embodied, active curiosity to the activities, it was hard for me to imagine going back to concentrating my energy on in-gallery programs and lectures. I left the Walker and eventually started working with Northern Lights.mn on the Northern Spark festival.

Illuminate The Lock: Madweyaashkaa: Waves Can Be Heard by Moira Villiard takes place February 18, 19 and 20 at the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock Visitor Center.

Q:  Tell us about some of the uses of technology in presenting art in public spaces.

 A:  This could be a very long list! One thing I’ll note is that the word “technology” is relative. By that I mean a pen and paper is a technology as much as a system of geolocated tags in an online map, depending on the circumstances. Here are a few examples of the art:

Wind Chime (after "Dream")I’m a fan of uses of sound in outdoor spaces, like the site-specific sound walks of Janet Cardiff or the “low-tech” act of hanging carefully tuned wind chimes in a grove of trees at the Walker Sculpture Garden. Wind Chime (after ‘Dream’) by Pierre Huyghe. 

These can be technologically complex, geo-tagged projects or use a relatively simple dial and listen phone tree, like the Art on Foot Poetry Trail at Silverwood Park in St. Anthony Main. 

Large scale projections and projection mapping — the process of fitting a projected image/s to the precise architecture of a building or other surface — is one of the most exciting and popular formats of temporary public art happening right now. This is a growing field, with a lot of flashy projects, but I tend to appreciate projects that focus on story and meaning over the fanciest tricks.  

For example, at Northern Spark 2014 we partnered with Mizna, a local organization that supports Arab and Arab-American artists, to present a project called Confluent that projected a simple video of the Euphrates River on the underside of the Third Ave Bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis. The project was about the temporary and conceptual joining of these two bodies of water that will never connect physically, but are interrelated by the ever-complicated relationship between the U.S. and Iraq. 

Also, that same year, Michael Murnane turned the facade of the Pillsbury A Mill into a celebration of ice fishing in an ode to his father and growing up in Minnesota.

Another one: Marina Zurkow and Paul Virillio’s Flight. Northern Lights presented this project for Illuminate South Loop in Bloomington, MN during the Super Bowl in 2018. On the back end of the installation, they created a feed that pulled daily weather data, plane departures and arrivals from MSP airport and bird migration data from the MN Wildlife Refuge to populate a real-time animation of planes and birds that was projected onto the side of the Hyatt Regency.  I love how the artists responded to the unique features of that specific site and time: winter in Minnesota, being near the Wildlife Refuge and the airport.

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord creates a metaphysical connection between them through a sensory experience, in an attempt to demystify this universal hymn.

The internet is also public space, despite the many challenges to free, open public access. This project by Montreal-based design studio Daily Tous Les Jours, I heard there is a secret chord, is both a gallery installation and an online space that created a data-driven, public choir dedicated Leonard Cohen’s to beautiful song “Hallelujah.” The piece consists of a room and a website. Both continuously broadcast Hallelujah’s melody, hummed by a virtual choir. This choir of humming voices is directly impacted by the visitors. Whether they are listening online or in-situ, the number of voices heard increases and decreases as a result of their presence. The fluctuating number is displayed in real time.

Q:  Please tell us about Northern Lights’ involvement with art on the Internet.

A:  Here are a handful of examples:

a coming together: a performance for our time by Kathy McTavish and Hawona Sullivan Janzen, 2020

In March of 2020, right as the COVID shut down took place in Minnesota, Northern Lights.mn was scheduled to have our annual fundraiser. We quickly realized we’d need to shift to an online experience, and the artists we’d contracted to present at the event decided to work together to make an online piece. a coming together was a live, 638 hour web experience that combined code, sound and graphics by Kathy McTavish with a poem written and recorded by Hawona Sullivan Janzen. Ticket buyers to the fundraiser received a link to view the piece online, which randomly generated the text bits, image and sound. It ran for the month of April 2020.

Neighborhood Climate Change, Tumblr feed, 2016-2017

We’re interested in what artists can do with existing tools on the internet, such as Tumblr, back when Tumblr was a happening thing.  In 2016 and 2017 we focused the Northern Spark festival on climate change. For the year in between the June festivals, we published works of photography about climate on a Tumblr blog.  In many ways Neighborhood Climate Change was a simple project — we invited photographers to take an image from their immediate environment that spoke to their personal experience of climate change. The page now serves as an archive of artistic climate observation from that year. Read more. 

iPad app for Ding an sich by Piotr Szyhalski

Several years ago, we launched a free app to view an internet-based work of Minneapolis artist Piotr Syzhalski on an iPad. When the work, Ding an sich, launched 20 years ago, it responded to a user’s touch to create individual interactive experiences. Over the years with changes to internet browsers and technology, the piece became functionally extinct. Media migration is one of the most significant challenge to works made for different technology platforms. The app allowed viewers to experience the work as it was originally designed for the early web.

Q:  How might we follow your work and your partnerships? 

Lots of ways! Sign up for our episodic e-newsletter here. And follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Q:  Do you have opportunities for volunteers? 

Yes! Most of Northern Lights.mn projects need volunteers. Follow us at the links above for volunteer calls or send a note introducing yourself to volunteers@northern.lights.mn.