Let There Be Light

Next time you start whining about our sunny skies, stop. Just stop. You know damn well that if the clouds roll in for more than a day, you, along with everyone else in the Valley, will turn into a surly, sun-depraved a-hole.

Just look at Scottsdale. As soon as the days got shorter, they freaked and organized the monthly Night Lights public-art event that featured a myriad of artworks, all based on the manipulation of light. They needed their fix and they needed it bad. So it’s no wonder that when those December rain clouds ruined the setup for artist D.A. Therrien’s Beautiful Light installation, the city immediately rescheduled the event. Just in case it’s cloudy that day or something.

As long as the weather cooperates, Therrien’s ginormous, 76-foot-wide array of quartz lamps will be suspended above the Arizona Canal at the SouthBridge/Scottsdale Waterfront, dazzling onlookers with its 300 kilowatts of while-light energy. Focusing on ideas of language, communication, and elemental technologies, the light display will scroll through four-letter combinations of DNA code, actual words, Morse code, and plenty of gibberish to create a chaotic language of its own.