A projection mapping installation on the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts during the nights of Miami Art Week
Miami, FL – On November 29, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation proudly presents Projections of a Coral City, a projection mapping installation on the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Miami. The large-scale display, expected to be viewed by over a million passersby during the nights of Miami Art Week, will run nightly, from 6 pm to midnight, from Tuesday, November 29th to Saturday, December 3.
Created by marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay (founders of Coral Morphologic), Projections of a Coral City, aims to focus attention on Miami’s deep connection to its marine environment. Using fifteen high-power projectors, the Arsht Center’s unique terraced form will be reimagined as an ever-morphing coral reef. The title references sea-level rise projections that suggest Miami may be submerged at some point in the future and its buildings and infrastructure reclaimed by the ocean. This monumental artwork is Coral Morphologic’s largest public project to date.
“Projections of a Coral City blends science and art in a way that captures your attention and your imagination. I’ve dreamt about this installation since Colin Foord and I talked about it when we met 15 years ago and the performing arts center was just inaugurated,” said Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibargüen. “It’s a project that makes clear art’s ability to inform and engage – which is central to our work as community builders. And it’s beautiful.”
The installation will feature images of a colorful array of Ricordea florida, a corallimorph native to Miami, growing over a scale model of the Knight Concert Hall itself, in a biologically accurate representation of what could be Miami’s Atlantean future as an artificial reef.
“Corallimorphs are an understudied group of soft corals that scientists predict will proliferate in the future in a world where oceans are acidified and stony corals can no longer calcify into reefs,” said Foord and McKay.
In conjunction with POACC, Coral Morphologic will be launching the Coral City Foundation non-profit whose mission it is to protect, document, research, and raise awareness for the pioneering urban corals colonizing Miami’s artificial coastlines. The Coral City Foundation (CFF) builds off Coral Morphologic’s successful Coral City Camera. The Coral City Camera (CCC) is a citizen science art project live streaming underwater video from the east end of PortMiami. The CCF will work to get the CCC on screens in Miami public schools and libraries, as well as conduct in-water monitoring of Biscayne Bay’s urban coral shorelines.
An ambient soundtrack by Coral Morphologic and Nick León will be played in the courtyard of the Arsht Center on Biscayne Boulevard where the public is encouraged to appreciate the work.
This project is made possible through the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as well as the Adrienne Arsht Center.
Media Contact: Rebecca Dinar, [email protected], Director/Communications
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About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
As social investors, Knight Foundation supports democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and in the success of American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once published newspapers.
About Coral Morphologic
Coral Morphologic is a scientific art endeavor founded by marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay in 2007 as a multi-faceted platform for the development of symbiosis between humans and coral. With coral as their primary muse, they present these reef organisms as inspiring and archetypal lifeforms via videography, multimedia, and site-specific artworks.
Coral Morphologic finds itself firmly rooted in the present time and place of Miami: a city built primarily from limestone recycled from thousands of years of local reef-building, and home to a diverse cultural community that mirrors its colorful aquatic ecosystems. Coral Morphologic has concluded that there is an inseparable affinity between Miami and the reef and seeks to illuminate this relationship through their work. The pioneering corals currently living along developed areas of our city serve as the contextual backdrop for Coral Morphologic to convey a new mythology of Miami in the Anthropocene. They hypothesize that the coral pioneering onto the local seawalls may hold the keys to understanding how reef organisms worldwide will adapt to human influence in the 21st century.