Or a city building art? Or buildings turning a city into an art gallery? Any way you look at it, Cincinnati’s recent Blink Festival of Art and Light, October 13-16, 2022, created the largest community-building event in our city’s history. The last time we held a Blink event in 2019, over 1.3 million attended; the 2022 Blink attendance of who-knows-how-many-more saw 101 official installations over a 30-block area during four nights blessed with perfect weather. The crowds kept coming and stayed late. No admission fee, no security checks, no boundaries. Everybody’s welcome and nearly everybody came.
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The secret that drew us all in is this new way of making lights that move us. Listen to Blink’s website promotion: “Sitting at the crossroads of innovative art and new technology, BLINK embodies the spirit of world-building, connecting artists who craft their own unique environments within the Cincinnati cityscape.“
World-building is the aspiration. I’ll settle for city-building. No other art form here has ever drawn so many for so long. I was most moved by the performance and the promise of the “Eyes Up” drone show, my first glimpse of what the drone light art form could do, possibly moving fireworks into history. I viewed it from the Banks, where I found another favorite, Chris Schardt’s “Parastella,” which is best experienced on your back with your head against one of the bean bags on the artificial turf in the company of eighty other strangers gazing up at a 20-foot diameter set of 48 spokes of 14,000 LED lights delivering endlessly absorbing visual versions of the music. And we’re all loving it—a psychedelic trip you can step into or out of any time.
One measure of the penetrating power of a festival like this is the number and quality of spinoffs it generates. I spoke to one such artist, Jason Alghussein, who did not make the official cut for sponsored Blink events. So Alghussein held a fund raiser, and with the $20,000 he raised, he hired an artist to program an installation that lit up the mural Jason had painted three years ago on E Clifton Ave depicting close-ups of oranges from his family’s grove in Palestine. The projection overlay weaved mesmerizing backgrounds and effects on the oranges with bold political messages about the plight of Palestinians against a soundtrack that made you want to dance. To promote his and other unofficial installations, Jason created a rogue app that mapped the unofficial installations and events on the official Blink map: www.blonkcincinnati.com. At last count BLONK had over 10,000 downloads.
The Blink Festival of Art and Light tells us something about the human psyche that could benefit our dwindling churches and any other event that needs to increase its attendance. We find these light shows irresistible. We will walk long distances with huge crowds to see more and more of these wonders, to be moved by how art can make magic with our buildings, to love where we live. No sporting event, political march, or beer fest has drawn us together the way this art form has. This marriage of LED lighting with sophisticated programming software mastered by creative artists has captured our imaginations the way fireworks extravaganzas and light shows at rock concerts have for relatively fleeting moments that reach fewer people. Blink turned 30 blocks of our city into a raucous art gallery four nights running.
Friday night I parked my car on Clifton Ave at the north end of the Festival map and started weaving my way south with some family just to see what we could see. Though I’ve lived here most of my life, I’ve never walked more than 10 blocks in any one stretch. That night, after the kids peeled off around Court Street, I walked down to the Banks, milled around there and then worked my way back up to my car. By 10:30 I’d seen the burning Memorial Hall, the Grove by the Library, the glowing fountain on Fountain Square, the Contemporary Art Center bathed in light and music, the Alleyology light show, the Secret Walls mural painting competition on Walnut, the full building projection on Central Parkway, Ezzard Charles and the marathon runner trailing a candle on Liberty Street—over 50 blocks of painless fascination with my fellow Cincinnatians.
Blink has given us a new and irresistible way to come together. And Blink is building our city.