>> thank you so much ♪

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>> thank you one, two, three, four. ♪

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>> this is called rah, rah, rah ♪

(applause). >> thanks everybody. make sure you come even when there is not a band here.

♪

>> welcome to "culturewire."

for the past year, the arts commission has been participating in the city's effort to revitalize the central market street corridor. in addition to the thursday arts market and are in store front, the art commission recently launched the artery project. for the next year, the artery project will bring energy and excitement to market street, recalling the st.'s heyday as san francisco's vibrant and bustling theater district. >> un.n plaza during business hours seize hundreds of passing office workers and students, but the activity winds down at 5:00 every day. theater productions bring some but traffic, but central market is more of a thoroughfare than a

destination after the sun goes down. on december 9, the artery project's launch brought a party atmosphere to market street, led by mayor gavin newsom, city officials flipped the switch on three new art installations that light up the st.'s architecture. a looping a video at 1119 market street was the first words to be some -- the first work to be seen that evening. before the unveiling, the director of cultural affairs spoke to artist jim campbell about the concepts behind bourbon reflection and how he created the work. >> i'm really excited to have your installation on public view starting today here on market street. you created a site-specific work. can you talk about that? >> yes, i looked at two or three different locations, and this one seemed the best. i work with customer electronics, so indoors seemed

the best for the work. i also like how close it was 2 market street itself. it is only about 10 feet away, so i chose this location. >> what is the duration? if someone were to stand in front of your installation today. >> at the moment, it is 12 minutes, but i've been thinking about adding footage over the time because it is going to go through a couple of seasons. >> could you describe a little bit in terms of what your creative process is? >> it is a curtain, and image made up of a curtain, so it is very valuable, and the idea was to use this technology that i've been using for the last 10 years, low resolution imagery, to reflect market street back to the pedestrians walking by. the reason that it kind of works in this environment is that you see people walking by. you see cars going by. you see buses going by, but you cannot help we the people are because it is low resolution.

you cannot see their faces. you can see the way they walk. you might be able to tell the kind of car going by. >> what do you think passersby will experience? >> i was thinking it was going to be a test of the success of the work if people stop and look. i have noticed in the last few nights that people do stop and look. a certain percentage. one of the things i was playing with was the ambiguity of whether it is alive or not, so people walk by, and they might even move like this back and forth, thinking that they are in the image, and they realize that it is a daytime shot, and that kind of thing. >> thanks for being part of life on market street. >> my pleasure. >> after the lighting of urban reflection, mayor newsom led the party to the corner of seventh street. lighting the way down the street were members of the filipino cultural center's youth program,

carrying traditional core role lanterns. on the side of the resort hotel is a projection titled "storylines." working with students from the art commission writer's corps program, paul organized a series of images with text captions. they will change every evening until a different -- and tell a different story. one block away, theodore watson has created an interactive installation that crosses over six street. spaces' begins with a photo capture station on the north side of the street that projects your face on to a building on the south side of the street. on opening night, the installation was an immediate hit with the crowd. we talked with the or what said about his remarkable installation. >> what inspired you to create

this interactive piece? >> the work i typically do is kind of interactive installations or both indoor and also outdoor and public space. for me, what i'm most interested in is how we can use technology to make the city, which is typically quite a static environment architecturally speaking -- how can we make it come alive? >> what i love about your work is there is such sophisticated software and electronics and complex connections that all have to work together to make it successful, but yet, all of that is invisible to the people interact with the work. >> they do not realize there is all these cables and projectors and computers and all this technology behind the scenes, and if you can keep it hidden, it feels like a really magical moment. to me, that is what is inspiring, and that is what makes the public, their eyes