Wingert's The Green and Growing City put an insouciant ring of animated birds, leaves, and general organic fecundity. McManus' Cool Waves crackled cyan and magenta, giving a funkified Sorcerer's Apprentice energy to the building's edges. Simpson's Dancers, originally filmed at street level on Market, now did a break dance through cutout animation 27 stories above it.
The three artists rode around by bike and car, marveling at the way the Peco setting cast their art starkly into the middle of a city, the middle of a night, the edge of a traffic jam (which, as the eastbound Schuylkill slows approaching 30th Street, might be the best vantage point of all).
"You think about Web traffic, traffic to your site," mused Wingert, 34, a video editor and technician from West Chester, his enthusiasm for this odd and exhilarating canvas fairly popping out of his red hoodie. "Here, it's literally traffic that is your main audience. Traffic on the road. Whoever's coming into Philly is your main audience."
The videos were visible from the Linc, the Walt Whitman Bridge, the Art Museum gazebo, Lemon Hill in Fairmount Park, the zoo, the expressway. They were visible to IRS night-shift auditors on smoking breaks outside their 30th Street building.
And they reflected, on this still night, seamlessly in the Schuylkill below.
"I moved around a few places," said McManus, 33, a teacher of animation at Moore College of Art and Design who bicycled to the bridge with his wife, Jessica Chiu.
"I wanted to see it in the context of the city skyline. I could see that from the new South Street Bridge pretty well. I went to the Walnut Street Bridge, watched from West Philly, by the train station. I rode my bike all around to see it from so many places. It's neat to see your work displayed like that."
