A real wow official opening for PST Art splashed across the sky early Sunday evening with a major event at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum by globally renowned artist Cai Guo-Qiang and his custom AI model cAI™ commissioned and presented by Getty in collaboration with the University of Southern California.
WE ARE was experienced by only 5,000 guests positioned directly on the stadium’s astroturf to witness what Cai calls “daytime fireworks.” As a note, the stadium typical holds over 77,000 guests.
The unique artwork uses organic, sustainable pigments and dyes rather than traditional pyrotechnics. The roughly half-hour long program, conducted live by Cai, debuted the first expansive daytime firework event featuring a drone formation equipped with pyrotechnic products ever in the U.S.
WE ARE presented nearly ten thousand twinkling mini firework shells installed throughout the Coliseum seating, custom-developed daytime fireworks, and choreographed drones carrying pyrotechnic products. When the drones arrived, multiple nearby viewers began to hum some sections of the Star Wars score.
The paints and pyros created a sky that temporarily at least evoked abstract watercolor paintings, igniting the sky with images of myth and humanity and drawing parallels to Prometheus’s theft of fire from the gods.
In two separate displays, the official Los Angeles flower, the bird of paradise, played a key part. There was an explosive dragon circling the stands, sparkling and booming loudly for the finale. Drones spelled out “We Are” with sparkles, and poetic electronic billboards offered the titles of five separate art sections along with resonant stories about them.
Cai Guo-Qiang asks “Is humanity’s creation of AI akin to the theft of fire and an attempt to steal the ‘heavenly secret’ with AI? …I hope WE ARE will stand as a grand gesture of the art world integrating the virtual with the real in the era of AI, and also as a powerful voice and decisive action in these turbulent times.”
It certainly integrates a vast created beauty with the natural wonder of the sky, drawing awed responses and cheers as each vibrant, dreamy, surreal, and lush element of the performance unfolded.
It was a brilliant, one-of-a-kind experience.
- Genie Davis; images by Genie Davis and Jack Burke