A Rare Chance to Stroll a Park Avenue Tunnel, in the Name of Art

 

Since the 1930s, the Park Avenue tunnel has been closed to pedestrians, and its weathered stone walls and ridged metal ceiling have been visible only to New Yorkers whipping past inside their automobiles.

 

That will soon change, to dramatic effect.

 

On Saturday, the city will temporarily shut the tunnel to car traffic, and the 1,394-foot cavern — which runs on Park Avenue between 33rd and 40th Streets — will be turned into an incandescent, echoing, interactive art show.

 

From 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., visitors will be able to enter the tunnel at 33rd Street, at the spot where Park Avenue dips sharply downward. (There are six signs there that tell pedestrians to stay away. Ignore them.) Participants will be instructed to walk to a midpoint in the tunnel and deliver short messages into a silver intercom.

 

The messages will then billow outward in waves of sound and arching light until they disappear. The intensity of each beam will be determined by the pitch and volume of the messenger’s voice. And the messages will shoot out quickly, one after another, creating a seemingly endless, ever-changing cascade of sound and light.

 

“What makes the experience valuable is the fact that it’s ephemeral,” said the installation’s creator, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, 45. The project “allows us to remember that we are on earth for a very brief period of time, and then we’re going to die. And it helps us live perhaps more intensely. We’re more alert to the fact that it ends, that we’re getting recycled, that there is a flow.”

 

The show will be staged on three consecutive Saturdays, the last on Aug. 17. A team of about 30 will build it each Friday evening, working through the night, only to take the entire setup down on Saturday. When the tunnel reopens to traffic sometime before 5 p.m., drivers will see no evidence of the light show.

 

Mr. Lozano-Hemmer has been creating large-scale interactive art for more than 20 years, and most of his installations mix architecture and performance in an effort to highlight the simultaneously seductive and predatory qualities of technology. He often explores the way individuals are willingly, and unwillingly, complicit in creating expanding cultures of surveillance.

 

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