New York City’s Park Avenue tunnel will be closed on Saturdays from August 3 through August 17, 2013 for the installation of an interactive light
and sound exhibition by artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Pedestrians will be permitted to enter the tunnel and will be directed
to a silver intercom in the middle of the tunnel, where they are invited to
speak. The speaker’s words are then
transformed, reverberating through the tunnel as sound and light that varies
with the volume and tone of the speech. The tunnel remains illuminated by the voices of the past 90 participants, and as new participants add their voices to the tunnel, older recordings are pushed to the end and replaced.
As the New York Times reports, upon reviewing plans for the
piece, the New York City Police Department requested that the reverberations be
on a six second delay, enabling the piece to be censored based on the content of the messages spoken. It is unclear
what kinds of words or sentiments, precisely, the City was looking to censor. The artist, however, ardently refused any
such restrictions, stating that the entire piece is about giving people a
platform to express themselves.
In the United States, only a few limited
classes of speech, such as true threats of violence, lack some degree of
First Amendment protection, and government attempts to restrict the content of speech are subject to strict limitations.
Constitutional jurisprudence recognizes that such protection extends beyond written or spoken words. The First Amendment protects other mediums of expression,
including music, pictures, films, photographs, paintings, drawings, engravings,
prints, and sculptures. See
Interestingly, Lozano-Hemmer’s piece involves multiple levels
of speech, first the expression of the speaker and then the subsequent artistic
transformation that occurs when the words are recreated as light and sound, becoming part of a larger work within
the tunnel. The degree to which the City could lawfully subject
Lozano-Hemmer’s piece to content-based censorship is certainly debatable. Ultimately, the artist reached a compromise
with the City, permitting all speech within the art piece except anything that
may cause immediate alarm, such as yelling “Fire!”
Gothamist features an image and video gallery of the piece here.
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