“In the Streets” is the first edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Illustration by Lale Westvind.
On the night of November 17, 2011, thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge holding electric tea candles, a kind of vigil for dashed hopes. Two nights earlier, their protest encampment had been evicted from Zuccotti Park, a sparsely planted public-private open space two blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, from which they had fomented a popular movement demanding broad changes to the status quo of global capitalism. The march had been planned in advance to mark two months since the inception of the occupation, but in the aftermath of the police raid, it took on a somber, even funereal aspect.
As marchers proceeded across the bridge overpass, a huge circle of light appeared on the long windowless wall of a nearby skyscraper, beneath the menacing checkmark logo of a telecommunications company. Within that circle was the calling card of their movement: “99%.” Other messages replaced it: “WE ARE UNSTOPPABLE,” “IT IS THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING,” “DO NOT BE AFRAID.” The crowd was momentarily stunned, and then began to roar these words back into the night.
Mark Read could hear it from the sixteenth-floor window of Smith Houses, an adjacent public housing tower, where he was wielding a 12,000-lumen video projector—a huge, expensive, borrowed piece of equipment, jury-rigged into place with a broomstick, gaffer tape, and baling wire. The plot had been hatched two weeks before in an Occupy Wall Street coordinating meeting, at the suggestion of an organizer known only as “Hero,” who had requested a “bat signal.” Read operated the projector for an hour and a half while the apartment residents who had volunteered its use, a mother and her three daughters, looked on. For Artinfo, the critic Ben Davis later called it “the year’s most emblematic work” of art.
OWS Bat Signal, Verizon Building, New York City (The Illuminator; November 17, 2011). Photograph courtesy of the Illuminator.
In March of 2012, the project got its own set of wheels, a 2002 Ford Econoline cargo van, and a name, the Illuminator. For the initial action, Read, a documentarian and adjunct professor of media studies, had assembled an ad-hoc group, including the projection-mapping designers Max Nova and JR Skola. A call to various Occupy working groups—the People’s Library, Outreach, Arts and Labor—soon yielded a team of volunteers who organized themselves as a horizontal collective of “visual artists, educators, filmmakers, and technologists.” The vehicle, equipment, and build-out was financed by Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream and longtime donor to left-liberal political candidates and organizations. A periscoping platform extends out of a hatch in the roof, like a tank, allowing the projector to tilt, rotate, and operate while driving. Bookcases were built into the doors, as Read first intended to operate the van as a mobile cinema and info-shop, screening films (“short informational videos about the movement, progressive cartoons from the '30s, big political comedians like Bill Hicks”) and distributing radical literature across the city.
Read and his collaborators looked to such examples as the Soviet agit-trains, an educational and propaganda initiative during the civil war following the Russian Revolution. Some trains held a newspaper office, a print shop, a radio station, a camera department, and a cinema, all in a row. Along the rail route from the urban centers to the war front, peasants from largely illiterate rural populations would be treated to film screenings, accompanied by music and oral commentary from presenters, including a young Dziga Vertov. The program eventually expanded to a fleet of 1,000 mobile cinemas in trains, cars, wagons, and steamships.
There were more recent precedents, as well. In July 2008, James Powderly, a cofounder of Eyebeam’s Graffiti Research Labs, had used a laser to project the letters “NSA” onto the same Verizon building, calling attention to the company’s collaboration with the US government for purposes of domestic wiretapping. (Powderly would be arrested in Beijing that summer and held for six days under suspicion of planning another illicit projection with Students for a Free Tibet during the Olympics.)
Top: #StompTheBan, Borough Hall, Brooklyn (The Iluminator; October 16, 2017). Bottom: Have You Heard of the Megajail in Chinatown?, Chinatown, New York City (The Illuminator and the W.O.W. Project; March 6, 2024). Photographs courtesy of the Illuminator.
The Illuminator has become a familiar sight at New York City demonstrations. The group originally called it the Batmobile, though their beat-up white van is more redolent of the Ghostbusters. The superhero analogy is apt, since the collective often moves with incredible agility to be on the front lines of simultaneous struggles: one night in Two Bridges with the housing movement, the next in Greenwich Village protesting sweatshop wages for garment workers. They raise funds for insurance and upkeep by accepting gun-for-hire work on a sliding-scale donation basis with organizations that can afford to pay for their services, taking requests via an online form. That, as well as the polyvalent urgencies of our moment, leads them to work on a wide range of campaigns. They evince a broad commitment to the left without using that or any other term of association, listing anti-capitalism, decolonization, and abolition among the political principles in their “guiding values” document.
In its site-specific waypointing, the Illuminator’s work takes after graffiti more so than cinema. Their projections can be like an x-ray or a truth serum for architecture, exposing the power structures behind the built environment. The edifices of the city are transformed and called to account, however briefly, by the light of the projector beam: A National Grid tank tells you it’s filled with fracked gas. A hotel admits its maids pay more in taxes than its owner. A slum apartment block confesses the heat’s been off for months and provides the landlord’s phone number. An immigration courthouse proclaims, “Deportations happen here.” A dragon appears on a wall and asks, “Have you heard of the megajail in Chinatown? There it is, to the right.”
Speaking truth to power is always a question of access, since the privilege of the overclass is to insulate itself from the consequences of its actions. Penthouses are up in the clouds, out of view of the tent cities sprouting up beneath, serviced by a precarious army of delivery workers. Black cars circumvent city blocks choked with demonstrators. The projection beam is useful in this regard, as it can be where ordinary people cannot. Last year, in air thick with wildfire smoke, a garden party fundraiser at the Museum of Modern Art unfolded while the luminous demand to “DROP KRAVIS” appeared overhead, referring to the current chair of the trustees board, whose fortune is derived in part from fossil-fuel investments. In March, Academy members at an official Oscars watch party at the Mandarin Oriental were confronted with the words “HOLLYWOOD SILENCE IS VIOLENCE” just out the window, referring to Israel's ongoing siege of Gaza.
Ultra Luxury Art / Ultra Low Wages, Guggenheim Museum, New York City (The Illuminator; April 27, 2016). Photograph courtesy of the Illuminator.
Such actions exist in a legal gray area. Though it is not a crime in New York to operate a projector in public, members of the Illuminator have several times been arrested, and interrogated, and at least once charged with “unlawfully posting advertisements,” their projector impounded as evidence. They have found their dual status as artists and activists useful in dealings with the police, as the former designation can seem to provide a license for the latter. The art of it all can cut the other way, too. Certain ironies are unavoidable where collective politics intersect with the culture industry, in which value lies principally with individual recognition. In this case, the superhero schtick stops short of secret identities, and collective members list the project on their curricula vitae. On the night of the Occupy march, after projecting the first “bat signal,” Mark Read gave an interview to BoingBoing, providing his own name and those of his collaborators, including the public-housing tenant who had let them use her apartment. In the current surveillance environment, in which the doxing of activists is commonplace, such disregard for information security seems rather ingenuous. They may not have done anything illegal, but the law is only one venue for potential reprisal.
The Illuminator’s work falls within a lineage of artists' interventions in public spaces usually reserved for commerce: The Situationists’ détourned billboards. Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s metatextual screed against advertising, which they bought airtime to broadcast (Television Delivers People, 1973). David Hammons hawking snowballs in Cooper Square alongside other street vendors (Bliz-aard Ball Sale, 1983)—or, for that matter, his casual desecration of Serra’s public sculptures (Pissed Off and Shoe Tree, 1981). Martha Rosler’s takeover of the Times Square Spectacolor display with a message the Illuminator would later project on a luxury development in Long Island City (Housing Is a Human Right, 1989). Jenny Holzer’s punk-poetic projection works (1996–ongoing).
Though most of the Illuminator’s visuals are deliberately simple (several slides with bold white text: banners made of light) some actions have included animation or more sophisticated projection mapping. In 2018, Trump’s Parc East condominiums were covered with crime-scene tape reading “Tax Fraud.” In 2019, while the Amazon Rainforest burned, flames appeared to envelop the Brazilian Consulate (Bolsonaro was in town). In other cases, the most straightforward gesture proves powerfully resonant. Earlier this year, after a historic mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant was demolished against community opposition to make way for condominiums, the Illuminator projected an image of the building into the lot where it had stood. (Residents are now attempting to landmark the historic district to prevent future development.)
Dangler Mansion; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (The Illuminator; July 23, 2023). Photograph by Lauren Cawdrey.
The collective understands that the initial projection onto a building is only the first phase of their message’s dissemination. For high-profile targets, like the United Nations headquarters, it may only be necessary (or advisable) to turn the projector on for as long as it takes to snap a photograph, then pack it in before security arrives. Though the initial audience is in the streets, there is a much larger and more dispersed secondary audience online. In 2015, artists illicitly installed a hundred-pound bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden atop a Doric column in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. Titled Prison Ships Martyrs’ Monument 2.0, after the memorial Revolutionary War crypt on which it was mounted, it was removed within the day by the Parks Department. That night, the Illuminator returned to the scene and projected an image of Snowden atop the empty plinth, throwing ash into the air to create a hologram effect. Only a handful of nighttime joggers saw the projection live, but images of it traveled widely.
But the work is most viscerally effective when it acts as visual accompaniment to street action, even as a libretto for “the human microphone,” as the text of the first projection on the Verizon Building had been. In 2017, the Illuminator worked with Chinatown Art Brigade to display the lyrics of a protest song, “Say No to Gentrification,” karaoke-style, on a wall across the street from the demonstration. In 2020, images of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade appeared in the tree canopy of City Hall Park during a moment of silence at the Abolition Park occupation. Collective members sometimes transport a smaller projector in a hand cart or even atop their heads, its images accompanying the demonstrators along their route, bobbing along with the gait of the march.
Like Vertov and his comrades on the agit-trains, the Illuminator often produces and projects images in the same motion, documenting their actions and demonstrating their tactics. In July 2018, President Trump made his first diplomatic visit to the United Kingdom. The Illuminator tailed him there and projected messaging onto the Palace of Westminster, the Ministry of Justice, and Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. There have since been copycat projections in London to bring attention to ill-maintained housing blocks in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster. The Illuminator maintains resources on their website regarding best practices for urban projection, and their custom software is open source. The call has been heeded by collectives and individuals around the world, in San Francisco, Washington, Berlin, Mexico City, São Paulo, Temuco, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere.
Top: George Floyd, City Hall Park, New York City (The Illuminator; June 25, 2020). Bottom: Cancel Trump, Palace of Westminster, London (The Illuminator; July 13, 2018). Photographs courtesy of the Illuminator.
In the past thirteen years, there has been a massive proliferation of moving images in the streets of New York and other metropolises. The city has always teemed with advertisements, but the current glut of video presses for our overstimulated attention at every turn, putting a premium on stillness and—perhaps more to the point—on deliberate action. The Occupy movement is now seldom mentioned, but its demands and its ethos have sunken into the groundwater of political organizing in New York and elsewhere. The “99%” of the original “bat signal” has become a mainstream term of art, and its lasting relevance is apparent in the disastrous effects of the ever-widening wealth gap. The energy of Occupy can now be found in a vast number of growing, intersecting movements, which combine their powers in times of particular need such as we see today, as anti-war demonstrators on university campuses again take up the tactic of occupation.
On a recent evening in Midtown Manhattan, I found myself outside of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee headquarters with a few hundred others whose voices were hoarse from chanting in the cold air. The block had been closed to car traffic, first by a bicycle brigade and then by a line of police, but a white van was parked inconspicuously across the street. Suddenly a powerful beam of light emerged from within. Words appeared on the facade of the building, between its rows of windows: “STOP THE BOMBS,” “CEASEFIRE NOW,” “AIPAC FUNDS GENOCIDE.” These nondescript offices, from which the business of empire is done, were emblazoned with the mark of their deeds. The names of New York elected representatives scrolled below, as if on a news ticker, accompanied by the campaign donations they have accepted from AIPAC, often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those who spoke into the portable public address could make reference to the information above our heads. At the end of the night, the projector was powered down before the van rolled away, disappearing into the anonymous throng of traffic.
