The Bay Lights

All photography: Lucas Saugen. Courtesy of Illuminate the Arts. 

A light sculpture on the San Francisco Bay Bridge's West Span, the Bay Lights is designed by artist Leo Villareal. The piece consists of 25,000 LED lights and marks the 75th anniversary of the bridge. 

Leo tests the lights, encoded programming creates random and complex light sequences that shift and change, with no beginning, middle or end. 

I think when people see this work, it's really about creating an experience, a communal experience, and it will transform the entire Bay and turn it into a space. The effect my work has is to bring things to life and to activate spaces. I'm using abstraction, there's no images, there's no text, so people's perception of what the piece is will be highly subjective and no two people will see the same thing but there will still be this point of connection between many, many people. 

During a six-month period from September 2012 to March 2013, a crew of electricians installed the light system at night to minimize impact on bridge traffic. The lights are aligned in strands on the bridge's vertical cables, solar panels offset energy use. The piece will be on display from dusk to 2am for two years, viewable from San Francisco and points north.

The Bay Lights is presented by Illuminate the Arts, a San Francisco non-profit dedicated to the creation and presentation of community-activating public art. 

The Bay Lights is a monumental piece of public art and my hope is that it will unleash all sorts of creativity around the Bay Area, change the way people feel about what can be done and really get art out and into the public realm in a very large way and I hope it will catalyze different arts groups and inspire many different groups in the Bay Area to create, to start making things and sharing and enjoying in a big way.