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Illuminating Oakland
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Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar
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July, 18 2007
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| There are many in Oakland who love to look back to the city's past. Sometimes, they forget to take a good, realistic look at where Oakland is and where it needs to go. Steven Huss is coming up with a proposal that meshes the past, present, and future in Oakland’s uptown area. |
Still from Victor Ingrassia’s animation, “Shore Morning, screened at the Great Wall in July.
There are many in Oakland who love to look back to the city's past. Sometimes, they forget to take a good, realistic look at where Oakland is, and where it needs to go. For such people, Steven Huss is coming up with a proposal that meshes the past, present, and future in Oakland’s uptown area.
Mr. Huss is Oakland's Acting Cultural Arts Programs Coordinator. After speaking with the mild-mannered Mr. Huss for 10 minutes, one can’t help but think about how well he’d fit in at Pixar or Yahoo. He gets technology, has ambitious plans regarding his work, and is apparently a man who likes to get things done. Bureaucracy isn’t something he’s big on.
Still, Mr. Huss understands how the system works. He is still a little nervous talking about a project that doesn’t have all its approvals in place as yet. The City Council hasn't even heard about it.
It’s the Luminous Oakland project. If you like talking about how Telegraph Avenue (around 20th Street) used to be the theater and café district, and how you yearn for its revival, you’re going to love this. Mr. Huss wants to use light to take you back to the future. When discussions started about revitalizing the area, what Huss saw was neon and white.
“What if the whole stretch of the street felt like you were entering a theater? You’d get used to coming back,” he says.
Imagine walking north on Broadway. When you reach the intersection with Telegraph Avenue, a beacon of light draws you toward Uptown. You catch the end of a performance where the dancers performed with light. You stroll some more, and watch kids doing laser graffiti on the walls, and then you run into a projection of an animated film on a big, huge wall. You stand in the parking lot, wondering how often this sort of thing happens around here.
Every weekend is what Mr. Huss is hoping for. He wants to start putting up posters and signs announcing what’s coming as soon as construction work on the strolling boulevards begins in uptown.
It could be called serendipity. Mr. Huss stumbled upon the Illuminated Corridor, an occasional show put up by artists and musicians, in which the artists projected an assortment of footage from various projectors, while live musicians provided the background track. Metrovation's Chris Curtis had partnered with Suki O’Kane and Alfonso Alvarez so that they projected their show onto the wall of a building his company owned, next to Luka’s Taproom and Lounge at Broadway and 20th Street. The first "Great Wall" took place in March. O'Kane and Alvarez used four projectors. A quartet was on the roof.
Mr. Huss saw the possibilities and decided to get involved. In May, the City began sponsoring the equipment, and experimenting. “We moved to a single projector, and one image,” says Mr. Huss.
There have already been three screenings on the Great Wall this year. The next one’s coming up in August.
This is just the seed for things to come. Mr. Huss has been busy trying to ink partnerships to make Luminous Oakland happen, like one with Youth Radio in downtown Oakland. He sees possibilities for a large number of artists to get involved, as opposed to the typical arts projects that fund and promote a few individuals.
The City's Steven Huss
“The only tension would be the high aesthetic standard,” he says. “It shouldn’t be dumbed down.”
Money could also add to the tension. It’s an expensive proposition. But the construction is helping. The City is supposed to apply a percentage of the construction money in the downtown district towards public arts in the area. The percentage (1.5) equates to $1.5 million. But when you think of an ongoing program, equipment, stipends for artists, a curator, you can see how far the $1.5 million will take you. Mr. Huss hopes to eventually spin it out as a private-public partnership of some sort.
Money is no reason to balk. There are those who believe that cultural arts are important to a city, and they will step up to see such a project through. “People of Oakland make up the city,” says Phil Tagami, a well-known Oakland developer who gave $1,000 to the Illuminated Corridor. “I don’t believe it’s the City’s mandate to do this. It comes back to us to do this. Part of the creative process – part of the tension that makes it interesting is what’s possible.” He points to the Crucible, the non-profit that offers classes in industrial arts, and its success.
“The amazing about the process of creation is getting it done,” says Mr. Tagami. “Every project goes through its crucible moment.“
If Luminous Oakland does make it through its “crucible moment,” and comes out from the fire and pressure unscathed, it could make the city a destination like no other in the Bay Area. Mr. Huss knows that. Now, he’s just got to make it happen. |
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