San Francisco turned 175 years old Tuesday. And what better way to celebrate than by shooting some rainbow lasers at City Hall?
Illuminate — the plucky nonprofit behind the Bay Lights, JFK Promenade’s car-free Golden Mile, and a series of rainbow laser cannons projected down Market Street and onto prominent local landmarks — debuted its latest effort just after sunset from UN Plaza. This time, the lights were mounted onto the roof of a Sprinter van, dubbed the “Awemobile,” which aimed nine lasers right at City Hall’s rotunda.
City Hall is often lit up to commemorate holidays and special events — but with, you know, light bulbs. Illuminate founder Ben Davis stated that this was the first time anyone has zapped photons directly at the seat of city government. Expressing gratitude for the city that has green-lit his “new, monumental art form,” he referred to himself as a “hope punk” fighting any lingering “doom-loop” narratives with color.
“It’s a fierce type of hope,” he said. “Hope with a spine.”
Insofar as lasers could ever be subtle, Illuminate quietly tested the Awemobile earlier this month by pointing its beams at a rock off Ocean Beach. The group did not publicize the test, as it wasn’t a federally sanctioned event, Davis said, and involved some impromptu negotiating with park rangers. “They let us stay long enough to get some photographs,” Davis said, “but they had to do their jobs.” Those photos piqued plenty of interest on social media, however.
Tuesday’s projection was fully permitted, and a crowd of about 200 gathered near UN Plaza’s skate park for the occasion, which happened to be SF’s birthday. As San Francisco was officially incorporated on April 15, 1850, and its area code is 415, the date has come to be known as 415 Day. Although smaller and without any DJs, the vibe was similar to that of Thursday’s unveiling of “R-Evolution,” Marco Cochrane’s translucent, 45-foot metal statue of a woman near the Ferry Building.
Civic Center has gotten a literal glow-up recently, and it was possible to stand in certain spots Tuesday night and see three public art projects at once. One is the current version of Charles Gadeken’s “Entwined,” a collection of 4-foot shrubs with sugarcube-like lights that glow in various patterns. Across Hyde Street and overhead is another Illuminate project that was installed earlier this month: Joshua Hubert’s “Spectra,” a canopy of more than 1,200 lights strung between the Asian Art Museum and the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
An otherwise ordinary gray van, the Awemobile was hardly some whimsical art car transported from Burning Man. And its lasers, radiating over a distance of more than 1,500 feet, were not as powerful as the stationary cannons that Illuminate has rigged up in the past — most notably, over Pride Weekend and during 2023’s Asia-Pacific Economic Conference, when rainfall lent them an ethereal cast.
But the beams’ softness, not unlike photos of the rings of Saturn, captivated onlookers until well after 9 p.m.
Most important, this was merely the Awemobile’s first public outing. Since it is, well, mobile, the hope punk and his team of volunteer techs intend for it to pop up around the city in the months to come.
“We’re inventing this technology before everybody’s eyes,” Davis said. “And so we’re muscling into position. We’ll keep modifying it. This is V1 of this concept.”