PETER BURR

Peter Burr’s Sunshine Monument consists of a series of seven animated architectures—one for each weekday—that reflect on museum structures literally and symbolically. The scrolling animations reference both the underlying formal principles of whitney.org and the current moment of Web design. Each of the animations in Burr’s signature style of animated black and white graphic elements, for example, translates the layout of the blocks of text and images on the Whitney’s website into an abstract building populated by wandering figures, while maintaining the site’s adaptability to the vertical and horizontal orientation of computer screens and mobile devices.

The animations strive to channel the atmosphere of the late Web 2.0 landscape of social media and user-generated content, characterized by an increasingly indexed, optimized, and gamified environment. Burr frames the project as a monument to the sun, making a round icon the centerpiece for an architectural organism commemorating the sun and driven by its rise and disappearance. Interspersed text elements, which were generated by the artist using AI as a tool, poetically reflect on sunlight and museum structures.

Using the moment of sunrise and sunset, as well as graphic space as a metaphor, Sunshine Monument depicts a flow of figures continuously moving through the structure or falling off its edges. The animations thereby highlight the contrast between the ephemeral quality of a flow of short-term visitors to a museum site and the long-term engagement of its stakeholders, from artists to museum staff and patrons.