MANHATTAN — Central Park’s newest art “installation” lets people experience a pleasant stroll in the park from anywhere in the world, at any season in the year.
The Central Park Conservancy launched a new video on Facebook Monday allowing people to go online and gaze upon the park’s pink spring blooms, green summer lawns, red fall foliage and white wintry landscapes.
The piece, called “Seasons on the Terrace: A Central Park Mapping Installation,” highlights the conservancy’s 30-year park restoration efforts through 3D digital mapping, a process that matched three-dimensional points of various scenes of park nature onto the two-dimensional plane of the arches of Bethesda Terrace.
"Unveiling this installation to Central Park's fans online made sense because of the international appeal of the park," Central Park Conservancy President Doug Blonsky said in a statement. "Whether you live in Manhattan, New Jersey, Europe, or Asia, if you've visited this park and loved it, you are a part of it."
The video was shot, animated and edited over four months in partnership with the Klip Collective, with narration by Kevin Bacon and music from Sting’s Symphonicities. Though it was screened live in the park last Wednesday, it is meant to be a virtual experience, conservancy officials said.
Both the piece and the conservancy’s efforts in restoring the park were created through a combination of art and technology, Blonsky said.
“We have always viewed [the conservancy's beautification] as a work of art dependent on the creative and thoughtful application of changing technology."
The video, which the conservancy hopes to use as a fundraising tool, was created by mcgarrybowen, which donates digital and design consulting services to the organization. It also got financial support from Urban Daddy and San Pellegrino.
“Without doubt, the Central Park Conservancy's transformation of Central Park over the last 30 years is monumental,” mcgarrybowen Executive Creative Director (Digital) Ethan Kant said in a statement.
“And to celebrate, we wanted to offer a most memorable and monumental transformation of our own.”
The conservancy said that it has invested $600 million since 1980 into improving the 843-acre park’s woodlands, lawns, trees and lakes, not to mention its 9,000 benches, 26 ball fields, and 21 playgrounds.
Through private fundraising, the conservancy provides 85 percent of the park’s $42 million annual operating budget.
Kant added: “It's just awesome to watch an encapsulation of all those moments come to life on the terrace facade and remind us how magical this place and this park really is.”
Enjoying the park's changing of the seasons from the comfort of one's own home is the opposite of another recently-unveiled Central Park park project, a site-specific soundtrack created by the Washington, D.C.-due Bluebrain.
Their "album," called "Listen to the Light," has music that can be listened to via an iPhone or iPad app while in Central Park that seamlessly changes in different locations thanks to the phone's built-in GPS, which tracks where the listener is walking.
