Buoy

Seoungho Cho's Buoy (2008), was presented in partnership with the Times Square Adverstising Coalition and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) for June 2012's Midnight Moment. Cho's luminous tribute to the California desert was a multi-channel installation on Times Square's iconic outdoor video screens, stretching down Broadway and 7th Avenue from 49th Street to 41st Street. Screening every evening in June, just before midnight, Cho's visually stunning moving image work turned Times Square into a virtual canyon – surrounding the viewer with a Western landscape captured in motion, light and digital transformation.

The golden, barren landscape of Death Valley, California, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the luminous and mysterious texture of Buoy. As the title suggests, the work reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, which was once the floor of a vast sea, now traversed by sight-seeing tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho's camera, vertical "strata" patterned the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho's composition. Cho accumulated his Death Valley footage over several years; the vertical patterning further represented the collapse of this footage into what appears to be a continuous drive through the desert.