The dancers atop Salesforce Tower are finally getting a rest.

One year after video images of performers doing step-overs debuted on the top of San Francisco’s tallest building, those images and other test patterns will be replaced by videos created by master’s of fine arts students at California College of the Arts.

Over the weekend, from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Saturday-Sunday, May 18-19, a series of five-minute student videos will be linked in a 20-minute loop. One of the new installations is “Video Can Not” — an apropos title that about sums the yearlong wait for the tower-top light show to work as planned.

“Day for Night” by electronic artist Jim Campbell opened to great fanfare on May 22, 2018. The intent, then as now, is for video cameras set around town to capture the life of the city during daylight and then transmit that video imagery onto the tower that same night. But it opened with prerecorded imagery and has continued to display mostly prerecorded imagery ever since.

On most nights, the tower top — affixed with 11,000 LED lights — appears a single color, often blue.

“It is still a loop,” says Campbell, an internationally known electronic artist who works out of White Light studio in Dogpatch.”We gave ourselves one to two years, and expect it to work the way we had hoped by the beginning of the fall.”

While Campbell continues to tinker with his own imagery, he offered to help CCA students get their videos displayed on the tower, which at 1,070 feet may be the tallest public art in America.

And the student ideas are even more out there than Campbell’s. Ava Morton, 26, made sound recordings while commuting on the 22-Fillmore Muni trolley. She then played the sound through an amplifier next to a water dish and filmed the sound waves. Those images she recorded will appear as bolts circling the tower.

Maxine Schoefer-Wulf, 31, took black 16mm film and punched a hole every 29 frames, to give the effect of the moon in its cycle.

“I wanted to juxtapose the rapidly transforming San Francisco skyline with the moon, which has been around for so much longer than any of us,” says Schoefer-Wulf, a graduate of Berkeley High School and UCLA.





Efe Ozman, 28, uses the backdrop of a blue computer screen that suggests a crash is coming. Then the words “video can not play” appear.

“I’m trying to create the moment of confusion in between the screen working and not working,” Ozman says.

Only Judit Navratil’s piece references Campbell’s, with a figure doing somersaults.

The students were selected from Lynn Marie Kirby’s fall course “Cinema and the Moving Image” and spent spring semester working under Kirby and Jeanne Finley, both professors of film and fine arts. Campbell helped them develop the video concepts and oversaw the projects.

“Jim has been incredibly generous with our students in every way imaginable, from conceptually to technically,” said Kirby, who hopes to incorporate the tower project into graduate video classes next year.

The installation is timed to CCA’s graduation ceremony this weekend. The student pioneers plan to gather at Blooms Saloon, where Campbell always previews his work, on Saturday night to celebrate their grand exposure.

“It’s just so generous of them to let us do this,” says Morton, who is from Houston and works in the education department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “I’m nervous and excited, nervous and happy — all mixed up.”

California College of the Arts MFA Student Presentation: 8:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m. Saturday-Sunday, May 18-19. Free. Salesforce Tower, 415 Mission St., S.F.