An art installation project at George Pearl Hall is a year behind schedule and over budget by about $100,000.
Chuck Zimmer, who coordinated the project, oversees the state’s One Percent for Art in Public Places Program (AIPP), a program that funds public art through tax dollars.
Zimmer said the project was originally supposed to be completed last year, but the artist was given incorrect dimensions for the art piece’s screen, delaying the project and bumping up the cost of the installation from $326,289 to $419,289, according to AIPP.
The money to fund the project came from the 1987-2010 allocation of $2,712,907.88 to the state of New Mexico from AIPP. Zimmer said that when the project went over budget, the $93,000 was pulled from $1,531,281.97 funding that has not yet been allocated to projects.
The project began in 2007, when Federico Muelas won the design contest for the project.
Muelas, an internationally renowned artist from New York City, created “Blue Flower,” a projected image of a drop of ink expanding in water.
“The image is reversed,” he said. “It’s flipped so you see it (the drop of ink) is growing instead of falling. It’s growing like a tree. This is why it’s called ‘Blue Flower.’”
The piece was supposed to be completed in 2009, but Muelas said bureaucratic hold-ups and coordinating the engineers and architects involved in the project’s creation delayed the project from breaking ground until 2009.
The piece is constructed with new technology developed by Muelas’s team. It features an audio and a visual component. The custom-made, 900-square-foot LCD projection screen allows the image to be seen at night and day. A set of speakers projects the sound of the ink falling into the water.
Muelas called the project “the most energy efficient outdoor display in the world.” It employs technology that uses the sun as a projector to create pixels as big as 4 feet by 10 feet.
“(The display is) the only one that can act as a rendering device during the day and a projection surface at night,” Muelas said.
“If you want to make a screen visible from the outer space, this would be the way to go. You’ll get only few spectators though.”
Muelas said each time the image is projected, the ink expands in a different pattern through the water.
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The project was originally designed to include a system that incorporated actual ink falling into water, but Zimmer said that due to AIPP prohibiting water in funded projects, Muelas eliminated the pump and tank. Instead, Muelas recorded more than 500 hours of ink falling into water, and the images will be uploaded to the screen.
Zimmer said the prohibition on water is because of maintenance issues. Water projects have to be constantly checked for leaks and other problems. Zimmer said that under the regulations pre-recording the water is within policy guidelines.
UNM receives money each year from the AIPP to buy art to display on campus. Zimmer said the money that is not used each year is pooled and available for future art projects in the following years.
The projection screen and the images are scheduled to be completed by May.
