KUSA - A spectacular work of art will light up the Bay Bridge for two years starting March 5. A display of 25,000 white LED lights stretching almost two miles wide and 500 feet high will be attached to the suspender cables of the bridge between San Francisco and Treasure Island.
The artist, Leo Villareal, is based in New York. The piece took weeks of perfecting as each single LED light is individually programmed to create a dazzling display.
"It's highlighting part of the bridge and this incredible piece of infrastructure that's so meaningful to so many people here in the Bay Area. It's bringing art, light and technology into the mix. It's site specific. It's made specifically for this location. So I've been sitting out here for over a month working on the sequencing and the programs and fine tuning it," Villareal said.
"This is abstract artwork. It's not a light show. It's something kind of new in that it's using very new material, software and LEDs. People are attracted to light and I think they'll respond in whatever way. If they know something about the history of art, light sculpture, they might be into that, or technology or algorithms or programming. So I think it will touch on a lot of the things that are sort of key in the Bay Area."
The display will be up until 2015. Villareal says they are estimating that 50 million people will see it during that time span, so he thinks it is a very impactful piece of public art.
Morgan Aguilar contributed to this report
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