The Blue Balcony _________________________________________________________________________________

The Blue Balcony is a cinema sculpture built in Le Petit Versailles garden by the artists et al. Residents of the East Village and the public are invited to nightly film screenings and weekend matinees. Here is a weekly schedule of the screenings.

The sculpture’s exterior is a nondescript patchwork of lumber, while its interior references the atmospheric movie palaces of the nineteen twenties, with an intricately meandering black-patterned ceiling constellated with specks of light, and walls that mimic outdoor scenery, giving the viewer the impression she has stepped into an unearthly time. During the screenings, ambient colored cove lighting and dim spots are left on, as was often the practice in cinema palaces, making it possible for attendees to be able to see while entering and leaving midprogram, as well as affecting the tenor of the film. The sculpture is intended as a fragment of what could be a larger cinema palace. With three levels of seats, it can accommodate an audience of fourteen

Thematically the balcony alludes to Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist fairy tale The Blue Bird, as well as to the no–longer-extant labyrinth of Louis XIV’s Gardens of Versailles and the 1924 silent cubist film L'Inhumaine, featuring Georgette Leblanc as a vampish chanteuse at home in the modern designs of the French architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.

In the same way that a good plot twist can shake a movie viewer out of a self-shrouding world,* revealing a double meaning, The Blue Balcony undertakes with slowness to perform a similar sleight of hand. Where the movie screen should be, two large panes of glass look out onto a garden path, the rippling leaves, and shades of light bouncing off the wall from Houston Street. The projected image that audiences are accustomed to seeing on screen will be permanently deferred for the duration of a visit to The Blue Balcony.

During a screening the soundtrack of the film remains intact, but without an image; the experience of watching a movie is disembodied.

Each film frame has been divided into a grid with nine sections. Each section has been processed with a computational algorithm determining the overall luminosity level of that section, in total outputting nine values. The values are then matched with nine sources of light embedded in the walls, individually controlling the levels of light, creating a pulsating periphery that reenacts the event of light bounced off a projected movie screen and onto the walls— though this time sans screen.

What the audience is left to experience is an illusion of what is missing, a chiasmus turning the black box cinema on its head, and extinguishing the delivery of attention en masse to a central gaze. Untethered, the audience’s eyes no longer service a narrative, but are, perhaps, at leisure to tarry . . .

*Siegfried Kracauer's description of detective novels "The Hotel Lobby" in The Mass Ornament

The Blue Balcony __________________________________________________________________________________

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