new JPMorgan Chase tower<\/a>. At dusk, he takes the controls.<\/p>\nVillareal works principally in the form of light installations, and for its new building, JPMorgan Chase commissioned an immense one. Celestial Passage is a swimming animated display on 181,200 small groups of LEDs, each functioning as an individually controllable one-by-six-inch pixel. They create patterns on the building\u2019s surface that slowly drift and dissolve into one another. (Every one of those pixels contains eight little clumps of LEDs, a quarter-inch across, so Villareal has nearly a million and a half lights to play with.) Some of the sequences look like diffraction, interference, or watery moir\u00e9, others more like meteor showers. They completely blanket the top-two setback sections of the 60-story building, and elements of the artwork extend about 750 feet down from the crown to the 29th floor. (He calls those sections \u201cpinstripes,\u201d suited to a building full of bankers.) From his workspace, he can adjust the lights in real time with a mouse click or a keystroke.<\/p>\n
Villareal has been testing and tweaking the array for a couple of months, and he will be doing so into the New Year. On his screen, there\u2019s a 3-D representation of the building \u2014 he can spin it at will \u2014 and a dizzying-to-me array of sliders and controls: gamma, chroma, duration of transition. The software is all custom built. \u201cWe have a real-time visualization here, so we can see everything, down to the single-pixel level, represented,\u201d he says. \u201cThen this is connected live to the building. I have a lot of different layers. There\u2019s this background layer, which \u2014 if I hit this button \u2014 \u201d He taps the mouse, and I am startled to see the top hunk of the building dim immediately.<\/p>\n
\u201cSorry, did you just \u2014 \u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I just soloed this,\u201d Villareal says. \u201cThat\u201d \u2014 he gestures out to the lights that are still on \u2014 \u201cis just the background layer. I don\u2019t know if you use any music software or Photoshop, but you can think of it as layers in Photoshop or channels in the sound mixer. And there are many other layers that are all being dynamically combined.\u201d He taps again, and the foreground reilluminates and once again begins to move, as if the lead guitar and bass tracks have reappeared over the drums.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to put into words exactly what it all looks like. Photographs don\u2019t fully capture it either. Broadly, though, when Celestial Passage is running, all those diodes \u2014 which can display red, green, blue, and white and are tunable to any mix thereof \u2014 appear somewhere in the range of butterscotch. Most are mounted pointing outward, but a second set points back at the tower\u2019s reflective exterior, adding depth to the display. The bankers within can\u2019t see the light sources themselves, somehow.<\/p>\n
\n Atop the tower, layered shapes slowly and continually dissolve into one another. Click to see it in action. (Video: Richard Barnes.)\n <\/p>\n
The transitions between patterns are variable and somewhat stochastic. Showing me one background layer, Villareal says, \u201cThe minimum is 2.3 minutes, and the maximum is 4.6. It\u201d \u2014 meaning the software \u2014 \u201cpicks some value, and it\u2019ll stay on that for that amount of time.\u201d Other patterns will cycle in front of that layer on their own separate periodicity. The slowness of the changing forms draws the eye in, both because you are inclined to look for repetitions and because the morphing shapes have the hypnotic quality of some of Yayoi Kusama\u2019s work or James Turrell\u2019s or (at a much smaller scale) even the forms inside a lava lamp. The pace is a lot of what he\u2019s adjusting these days, Villareal says, as he controls \u201chow it flows. It shouldn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s rushing through. But the motion needs to be fast enough that you can perceive that it is moving. If you slow it down too much, then it feels just static, and that\u2019s not really what it\u2019s about. But also we\u2019re allowing for some outliers so that there are these moments of surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n
In some of those, the dissolves periodically give way to something that looks like a curtain of twinkling falling stars: \u201csparkle layers,\u201d Villareal calls them, \u201cand yet another layer that\u2019s doing these larger big gestures that are meant to be seen from a distance.\u201d Does it repeat? \u201cIt\u2019s randomized.\u201d He explains that they started with lots of computer-generated patterns and then, when he saw one he liked, they would grab it and give it a slot in the lineup.<\/p>\n
Villareal, who studied sculpture at Yale and interactive communications at NYU, began making high-tech art in the early days of virtual-reality computing. \u201cWe had this Silicon Graphics computer, like a million-dollar computer\u201d \u2014 extremely high-powered for the 1990s, which is to say it had less processing oomph than a fancy fridge does today. He made his first light-based work, a grid of 16 strobes and an itty-bitty circuit to drive them, at Burning Man in 1997. \u201cIt was just a beacon to get home to my camp at night. It had a language to it, and you could see it from miles away. And I realized that by going the other direction from virtual reality, which was all about more resolution and needed faster everything, I could do a lot with 16 pixels and zeros-off-ones-on.\u201d<\/p>\n
His profile rose dramatically in 2013, when he covered the San Francisco\u2013Oakland Bay Bridge in LEDs that shimmered up and down and across the suspender cables. The Bay Lights was understatedly dramatic, especially as it delineated the pure structure of the bridge over the open water, and it had a ten-year life before the salt air and traffic vibrations wore it down. It\u2019s being rebuilt now for a relaunch in the coming months with sturdier electronics and twice as many lights. \u201cI want to respect the Bay Lights everyone knows and loves,\u201d says Villareal, \u201cbut I\u2019ve learned a lot over the past 12 years.\u201d More recent commissions have come from London, Santa Fe, and Tokyo. New Yorkers have also experienced his work firsthand when transferring from the 6 to the F at Bleecker Street: The MTA installed Villareal\u2019s illuminated hex grid, Hive, in the station in 2012.<\/p>\n
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\n Villareal\u2019s Hive (2012), inside the Bleecker Street station.
\n Photo: James Ewing\/JBSA\n <\/p>\n
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\n The Bay Lights (2013) on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco.
\n Photo: Shutterstock\n <\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/ccd73d1757707ea39709b59e1567065aab-GettyImages-1249536292.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Illuminated River (2019\u201321) on the Thames in London.
\n Photo: an Woitas\/picture alliance via Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
I confess that when I heard a preliminary description of Celestial Passage, it made me uneasy. A hard blue-white LED glow is increasingly the look of midtown, partly because those diodes can be so bright in a tightly delineated band of the color spectrum, partly because this century\u2019s new buildings, from One Vanderbilt to the dual towers at Manhattan West, are intensely lit on top. Although eye-frying light seems urbanistically correct in Times Square \u2014 the sky\u2019s the limit there, it seems to me \u2014 the rest of Manhattan is another matter, and expanding that level of razzle-dazzle 20 blocks east and north and south would be transformatively garish. The Empire State Building has been fitted with highly programmable LEDs as well, and some nights it crosses the line into blinky pinball jitteriness. This JPMorgan Chase project, I thought, might aim to make itself seen through the visual cacophony, and I feared that we were in an illumination arms race \u2014 that we would end up with a Third Avenue weed shop at skyscraper scale.<\/p>\n
Instead, Villareal went the opposite way. On most nights, the glow is remarkably restrained. For holidays and other special events, JPMorgan Chase will take over the building\u2019s crown, and on those evenings, it\u2019ll all be saturated colors and bright visuals: a giant image of a waving American flag capped the tower this past Fourth of July, for example, and a Union Jack appeared later in the year to welcome some British visitors. (A JPMorgan Chase representative told me that the schedule for running these other displays in lieu of the artwork was still being worked out. The holiday weeks\u00a0 include a lot of Hanukkah-Christmas\u2013New Year\u2019s color.) But when Villareal\u2019s work is up there, it\u2019s nuanced and comparatively unflashy in large part because the LEDs aren\u2019t cranked up all the way. He tells me that, at their peak brightness, they\u2019re running at a quarter of their maximum output.<\/p>\n
In its evenness and responsiveness to the software, the light has an unexpectedly old-fashioned vibe. The warm color temperatures \u2014 \u201cI didn\u2019t know you could make brown light,\u201d Villareal says \u2014 suggest Edisonian incandescence instead of diodes. He\u2019s been working on a separate commission lately in which LEDs are embedded in slats of white oak, and maybe it\u2019s no accident that the projects are in the same tonal family. \u201cI\u2019ve talked about my work as being these digital campfires you gather around,\u201d he says, \u201cthe same way people did around my first piece at Burning Man.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time he says this, we\u2019ve been talking quietly for nearly an hour at his computer setup, and I notice something. The pauses in our conversation are getting longer, and that\u2019s not because either of us is bored or has checked out. It\u2019s because the lights are within view, right outside the door, and as much as I am interested in what he\u2019s saying about this project, I can\u2019t stop looking at it. I remark on this to explain why I\u2019ve drifted away from asking him questions, and he says he\u2019s encountered this phenomenon before. \u201cThe security guy who works here came up one night and was very official, but he started looking at it and talking about it, saying, \u2018This makes me feel like I\u2019m a kid and I\u2019ve seen fireworks for the first time.\u2019\u2009\u201d I nod, then don\u2019t say much more as my gaze once again drifts toward the tower. So does his, as he continues his edit. Click. Click.<\/p>\n
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\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leo Villareal\u2019s Celestial Passage (2025) as seen from a building near Bryant Park. Photo: Richard Barnes Leo Villareal\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9930,49,48,33917,21985,94666,24637,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-363811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-cityscape","12":"tag-jpmorgan-chase","13":"tag-neighborhood-news","14":"tag-new-york-magazine","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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