What On Earth Is This New Public Art Project on the LES?

Starting March 13, you won’t have to leave the city to see the night sky; you’ll just need to take a trip to 159 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side.

Chilean-born, New York-based artist Sebastian Errazuriz is installing a projection that will stream live footage of Earth from a NASA satellite, in a vacant lot near the corner of Ludlow and Stanton streets.

The installation is an “attempt to provide a platform to see ourselves from a macro perspective, a tiny instant within a much larger space and time continuum,” Errazuriz wrote on Instagram on Friday.

The experiment starts Wednesday and will run 24/7 through April 14.

Errazuriz has worked in sculpture, design, and architecture. But he’s probably best known around New York for his public art installations. In 2009, he placed grave markers in a DUMBO park, just under the Brooklyn Bridge, to represent the number of New Yorkers who die every week. In 2015, he projected videos of himself yawning onto advertisement screens in Times Square. And, in 2017, he vandalized Jeff Koons’s “Snapchat X” on its opening night.

Errazuriz will also project the NASA footage onto the New Museum’s exterior on Wednesday night. Imagining the collaboration with the New Museum before it became official, Errazuriz revealed the work that goes into planning a public art installation. “What would it take? How many projectors would we need? How powerful would the beam be? What type of lens? And from where would we project?” he wrote on Instagram this weekend. “How do we get the permits? Do we go guerrilla style? Who do we know at the New Museum? Would they be willing to help us? What if it was just for one night? Like an eclipse?”

Errazuriz has called this latest installation “blu Marble” — a double reference to “blue marble,” a nickname for Earth, and “blu,” the e-cigarette brand funding the installation.

The installation will kick off with a private event at the Richard Taittinger Gallery, featuring former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. Aside from the private launch, “blu Marble” will take on a very public purpose on the exterior of the New Museum and the streets of the Lower East Side.

“Imagine if we could look up at the night sky and see ourselves; see the Earth right that moment, streamed live from space?”