Sometime in the next few weeks, residents of San Francisco's Hayes Valley will get a brand new neighbor--a huge, glowing, tree-topped temple straight from the parched sands of The Playa.
For the past several years, the Hayes Valley Art Coalition has filled neighborhood park Patricia's Green with a series of art installations, each one more elaborate than the last.
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While the previous exhibition featured a four-story woman made of scrap metal and recycled car parts, this new work, "Future's Past" by New York artist Kate Raudenbush, is likely to take the cake.
Future's Past will be the park's first piece to light up at night, filling the area from dusk to dawn with the eerie glow of hundreds of red, yellow and green LED lights set just below the illumination level of the surrounding street lamps.
While an intriguing addition, the lights have also proved a bit of a hindrance to the coalition's scheduled plan. "I had hoped that we would already have it installed," said Hayes Valley Art Coalition president Russell Pritchard, "but we are still negotiating with Rec and Parks for installation of power in the art oval."
Local Addition notes the coalition expects Future's Past to be only first of many future installations in the park to boast illumination.
That Raudenbush's work, commissioned for the 2010 Burning Man festival, looks like something out of the movie Tron is no accident. "I chose to address the concept of modern development by creating a cautionary tale of collapse," writes Raudenbush in a post on her website. "Future's Past is a modern ruin, an architectural artifact found in the future. Once built as a monument to technological progress, this pyramid of system circuitry has been abandoned through unchecked consumptive collapse, but reclaimed by the resilience of natural forces, and evolved consciousness, symbolically represented by the roots of a sacred Bodhi tree, a symbol of Siddhartha's seat of enlightenment, and our own."
Check out this slideshow featuring pictures of Future's Past:
