BRIC TV

BRIC TV is an Emmy award-winning public access cable channel.

(0:00) When you make art, we cannot do it to please others. We have to do it to make them think. And some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it.

(0:11) But at least you’re making them think. And that’s really what I want. My name is Grimanesa Amorós.

(0:17) I’m a multimedia artist. I was born in Peru, and now I live and work in New York City. Growing up in Peru is quite interesting from many different areas.

(0:32) It’s because we have what is the coast, the Sierra, and the jungle. In my case, I grew up by the ocean. So I think that water has been a very great influence.

(0:43) This brought a lot of bubbles that they accumulate all around the shore. So I think that since I was very little, I got very interested in the play of light and water. I discovered light on a trip that I went to Iceland and many, many years ago, I can’t recall exactly, maybe it was 2000, and I couldn’t sleep.

(1:09) And so I woke up and I encountered this unbelievable sky. And I truly didn’t know what it was, but I couldn’t stop saying, wow. And then obviously later I’d realized that it was in the aurora borealis.

(1:21) And so since then I said to myself, wow, if I could only share this with others, this moment, what I felt, wouldn’t it be amazing. The project and the feeling, for example, in the case of Hedera, has been thought about the community. You know, the park itself and the architecture, how the piece was gonna be responding to the environment and with the people.

(1:49) And what I want is to activate the community. When they go, they’re gonna have different thoughts, concepts, they’re gonna experience the world differently, and that somehow activates them. It inspires them to be more creative and many wonderful things will come out from it.

(2:09) To build a piece like that, it requires a lot of collaborative team effort. Building the piece there, being on the field for three weeks, that’s an amazing, magical experience as well to see how from nothing gets built. How many, you know, tubings I’m gonna be using, how many domes, because that requires about the amount of LED lines and electrical hardware, power supplies, and all the goodies that it goes with it.

(2:34) I truly have to know what I want because each lines are 240 feet, some of them more. And so it requires a lot of manpower to hold them. You know, some of them are thick, they’re heavy.

(2:48) So I cannot improvise that much because to put each tube takes maybe three hours, sometimes more, depends, right? So imagine if I have to, okay, I’m sorry, I don’t like it now, it goes down. So it is pressure for me to perform. You require confidence to truly know what you want.

(3:10) And I think in my case, I have got it through time. Hedera is a 360 all around. So you constantly have to build the piece having that in consideration that it has to make sense to me from all these different angles.

(3:34) But you know, obviously my intention is truly to grab my viewer. So if I’m able to take you into the piece for seconds, then I think that I have been successful.