SAN FRANCISCO, CA—On Tuesday evening at 9pm local time, a 1.8 mile western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge will be transformed into a massive, two-year-long public art project called The Bay Lights.

Each night for the next two years, from dusk until 2am, the northern side of the bridge section between San Francisco and neighboring Treasure Island will display a dazzling array of 25,000 LEDs. It's an assortment of seemingly animated patterns, strung vertically on the bridge’s twisted steel cables. (Note: Ars will have a photo gallery of The Bay Lights in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.)

Each LED is individually addressable over an Ethernet, copper wire, and fiber optic network strung out onto the bridge for this purpose, filtered by 528 custom versions of these Philips power and data supply boxes. The organizers of the project say that there is a constant stream of approximately 32Mbps of data flowing across that network to control the entire constellation of lights. The artist behind it, Leo Villareal, is expected to set the entire project in motion from his laptop during an event at the local Ferry Building, and he'll then let his own custom-built software take over.

At a press conference a few hours before the Bay Lights' debut, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee expressed his happiness with the project while underlining its potential for tourism.

"I actually feel that when we unveil this tonight, the feeling that I'm going to be having is that we just won another World Series, because it's going to be that kind of excitement," he said. "You can imagine anything you want in these lights. Give yourself [over to this] and use your own imagination to work with these 25,000 lights—for me, it's the mustache you'll see in these lights."

The mayor also said that while the bridge is currently permitted for two years, he hopes it continues beyond. Ars asked Villareal if he would like to expand the installation to all sides of the bridge if the light project's tenure were to be extended. "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," he said.

Fiat lux

Villareal has done similar work involving LEDs and computers for more than a decade. He has a permanent installation at the Bleecker Street station in the New York City subway, and his other projects span museums around California, New York, and Washington.

“It's symbolic of the Bay Area, because it's a beautiful marriage between technologists, artists, and can-do producers to drive this through the bureaucracy,” said Timothy Childs, a well-known local entrepreneur and board member on Illuminate the Arts, the nonprofit that was organized to put on the Bay Lights project.

“One of the goals of the project is to allow for the imagination of people to be able to see something as enormous as this,” he added. Childs also had a closer hand in the project itself—he designed a small, translucent clip for the wires to fit into. It was 3D-printed at his artist space, World Headquarters, on Treasure Island.

“Obviously it's going to open up the seeds of interest in other cities to try to kick it up and try to rise to the challenge [to build something] as beautifully audacious as this," he said.

But big art doesn’t come cheap: all told, $8 million in private donations has been budgeted for the two years of display and for the de-installation (if it occurs). Many of the donations are coming from Silicon Valley’s technorati: Paul Buchheit, Google’s employee number 23 and the creator of Gmail, donated $250,000, as did WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg. Well-known venture capitalist Ron Conway is donating $50,000. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus are also donors. (Individuals can “sponsor” individual lights at $50 a pop.)

The San Francisco digital set’s interest in the project may also explain why the lights only face downtown SF and northward towards wealthy neighboring Marin County—and not to working-class Oakland, where the other end of the bridge connects. (Full disclosure: I live in Oakland.)

The electricity bill alone will be staggering. The lights are energy efficient—each only draws a single watt—but together the installation (including the boxes and data cables) will still collectively consume 150 to 175 kWh to operate for about seven hours each night. In other words: it will cost approximately $22,000 during the two years just to power the lights.



25,000 LEDS held up by 50,000 zip-ties

While the art project does involve more advanced kit like fiber optics, there are two pieces of surprisingly lo-fi technology that make the project work: zipties and plastic wire clips.

Each LED is approximately the size of a US half dollar coin (which is 1.2 inches in diameter), and each is one foot away from the next LED. They’re strung together with electrical power and data cables. That entire bundle is attached with steel-grip Ty-Rap plastic cables—there are 50,000 such ties on the entire bridge and 100,000 feet of wiring.

“The ties last up to five years, are UV-rated, and have a steel-grip,” Saeed Shahmirzai, the construction manager for the entire project, told Ars. “[We needed to] use a method that doesn't alter the structure of the bridge.”

Shahmirzai is incidentally also in charge of electrical and lighting on the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which is set to open on Labor Day weekend 2013. (The old one is being replaced due to damage caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.)

“The biggest challenge was getting to work,” he added. “There are 280,000 cars on [the bridge] every day—we can only close one lane at night.”

Depending on the vertical height of the light string, one Phillips PDS IP-enabled box can control anywhere from 1 to 50 lights.

“[Villareal] has his light program running on some computers within a network equipment rack,” explained Ray Cooper, a senior project manager at Transdyn. The company is contracted to do the communications portion of the installation.

“That's connected to an Ethernet switch which is in turn connected to several media converters. We have fiber [running] across the bridge, and we have 24 router cabinets and are all home run back to the cabinet. From each router box we go to the switch cabinets that are tied to the light boxes themselves that run the LEDs. The network is in place to operate the individual light strings. [Villareal’s] computer that's running his program is sending out commands to each of these IP addresses across the network.”

But as a precaution, he noted, remote access to the lights will be disabled “so there's no possibility that somebody can get on there and muck with the system.”

By all accounts, nearly everyone involved has enjoyed turning a part of the bridge into a huge, Christo-sized art installation.

“By far this is one of the most rewarding [projects I’ve ever worked on]—everybody can see and enjoy it,” Shahmirzai added. “[The construction] industry as a whole is always an easy target for bad things: traffic jams and potholes, but it's nice to see a project that has a different goal.”