For one night, every two years, AURORA turns downtown Dallas into an open-air, urban playground of new media art: light, video, sound, performance, and projection on an unprecedented scale. Aurora’s aim is to liberate art from space and disciplinary confines, involving the general public and the international arts community in an inclusive and larger cultural conversation about artistic experience. This year, crowds attending Aurora-Powered by Reliant in the Dallas Arts District set a new record for attendance. Early estimates indicate 50,000 people poured into downtown to take in the expansive light, sound, performance and new media event that stretched across the 68-acre district. This year’s event featured 80 international, national and local artists. The 19-block Dallas Arts District was divided into sections, curated by six renowned artists. One section included art created by the talented students at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, whose campus sits in the district. Among the major installations was a new version of the video projection by German artist Leo Kuelbs and the artist collective 3_search. To the voice of an opera singer performing below, the images projected onto the Wyly Theatre made the cube-shaped building appear to contort, rise, and fall. At nearby mixed-use, high-rise One Arts Plaza, artist Memo Atkin projected a series of beams two miles into the sky, which created music when the lasers crossed and amazed the audience below. And a few blocks away, visitors could walk down “Memory Lane,” a long line of projected images of Dallas in the last century, provided by people from across North Texas.
Touch your mouse below to scroll through images from this event:
photos by Stevan Koye, Nathanael Rehlander and Carter Rose
This year’s Aurora included installations at a number of neighboring cultural and commercial institutions including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas City Performance Hall, Klyde Warren Park, Trammel Crow Center and the new HALL Arts. Installations were also created in the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe, St. Paul’s Methodist Church and First United Methodist Church.
