The City of West Hollywood’s Moving Image Media Art (MIMA) program will unveil Body Politic by Nancy Baker Cahill, a newly commissioned two-part public artwork that will exist simultaneously in three dimensions along the iconic Sunset Strip this fall, starting on Tuesday, October 1, 2024, approximately one month prior to the national election and concurrent with the City of West Hollywood’s “Get Out the Vote” efforts.

An Artist’s Reception for Baker Cahill will take place on Friday, October 4, 2024 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Sunset Spectacular billboard plaza, located at 8775 Sunset Boulevard. The event is free. RSVP is requested via Eventbrite. Parking is available in the adjacent parking lot (parking is limited to availability).

The City of West Hollywood’s Artists and Icons series will host a conversation with Nancy Baker Cahill on Wednesday, October 16, 2024 at 6 p.m. at the City of West Hollywood’s Council Chambers/Public Meeting Room, located at 625 N. San Vicente Boulevard. The event is free, but seating is limited. RSVP is requested via Eventbrite. Parking validation for the adjacent West Hollywood Park five-story structure will be available at the event (parking is limited to availability). The West Hollywood Artists & Icons series is a periodic event series organized by the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division that celebrates the lives and work of West Hollywood residents and artists who present their work in the City, and who have made significant contributions to local, national, or global culture. The series has previously focused on many artists and local icons including Lou Adler, Barbara Bain, Bette Davis & Mae West, Frances Taylor Davis, Dan Guerrero, Michael McMillen, and Tim Sullivan.

The ten-minute Body Politic video artwork will be on view simultaneously at the top of every hour on the face of three digital billboards on the famed Sunset Strip in the City of West Hollywood from Tuesday, October 1, 2024 through Friday, February 28, 2025. The digital billboards are located at 8775 Sunset Boulevard (Sunset Spectacular billboard), 8743 Sunset Boulevard (Invisible Frame billboard), and 9157 Sunset Boulevard (Streamlined Arbor billboard).

The second part of the work will exist in an augmented reality three-dimensional space above two billboards; the augmented reality experience will extend the video artwork on the Sunset Spectacular (8775 Sunset Boulevard) and Invisible Frame (8743 Sunset Boulevard) billboards and will only be visible while on site with the 4^th Wall app, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform. The historic exhibition will be the first time an augmented reality experience will interconnect with an artwork presented on the face of a full-motion billboard.

Body Politic centers around the themes of body sovereignty, data rights, voting rights, and basic human rights. Viewers will witness a vivid and abstract odyssey of a round seed that appears and grows large enough to ultimately eclipse the boundaries of the billboard, a blinking neon sign, “YOUR BODY, OUR BODY,” marking each phase of the film, and three dancers, all queer bodies, who are seen dancing under a spinning disco ball. The disco ball serves as a symbol of queer liberation, an individual cell, and as a stand-in for a planet. As a grand finale, the work concludes with a crescendo of headlines related to twelve basic human rights, ending in with the final message, “VOTE.”

To underscore the dissolution of rights and the threat to our individual liberties on a cellular level, Baker Cahill’s unprecedented, interactive, augmented reality intervention on the top of two billboards will illustrate democracy in action, in real time, to further amplify and extend the aesthetics and conceptual territory of the video. Through Baker Cahill’s free 4th Wall app, viewers on location will experience a monumental AR animation of dancing human figures on the top edge of the billboard at 8743 Sunset Boulevard, under a huge disco ball that, like the bodies, will register votes cast through the 4^th Wall app, in real time. Dance is a known act of resistance and contains the emotional range requisite for confronting a loss or restoration of human rights. The figures, their bodies made up of voting ballots, will begin as ghostly apparitions above the billboard: the boundaries of their bodies perceptible as an iridescent trace.

As a global audience “votes,” by choosing one of 12 rights offered in the app, each with its own color: the right to vote; to own your data; to clean water; to education; to safe shelter; to be treated equally under the law; to bodily autonomy; to a separated church and state; to personal safety; to a healthy planet; to freedom of expression; and to protest peacefully and each right will have its own assigned color and texture. The spinning disco ball and the bodies will evolve in real time, glowing by color as the cast votes come in, reflecting the respective votes of those who have contributed to co-building a body (or bodies) politic. Voting can be done in the app from anywhere, but experiencing the work evolve requires being physically present on site in West Hollywood. This collective experience not only models an immediate visualization of democracy in action; it goes one step further. After voting in the app, an automatic link will appear for further direct action on behalf of the right that is listed. This is the first such intervention of its kind.

According to Baker Cahill: this art installation asks an unknown global public to be a part of a larger, participatory civic discourse. People engaging on the artist’s 4^th Wall app will witness their votes – their prioritization of human rights – changing the constitutive elements of the artwork in real time. In this historic moment, artistic interventions can play a critical role in provoking meaningful public discourse and action. Public digital billboards offer an aesthetic and conceptual opportunity to engage a public space through mesmerizing visual content and rigorous messaging, inspiring people to use their voices and show up at the ballot box to assert their constitutional right to vote and to enact change. Participatory, co-built AR experiences allows the artist and the City to include audiences local and global, and model the democratic process in real time.

“We’re privileged in West Hollywood to feature the work of Nancy Baker Cahill as part of the City’s Moving Image Media Art program, which activates thought-provoking human experiences through digital exhibitions to a wide audience on the Sunset Strip,” said City of West Hollywood Mayor John M. Erickson. “West Hollywood is the ideal location for Body Politic. The Sunset Strip is the epicenter of our City, where so much culture has been created and shaped through the decades. The themes of Body Politic – body sovereignty, autonomy, freedom, basic human rights – are at the root of our City’s values and commitment to civic activism. I’m also really excited about how augmented reality will enhance experiencing the work. It’s going to be amazing, and deeply impactful.” 

Body Politic imagery was created using a combination of motion capture, Baker Cahill’s 3D Slipstream sculptures, and virtual production landscapes/backgrounds. The 4^th Wall app is free to download: https://www.4thwallapp.org/.

The City of West Hollywood’s MIMA Program annually presents three different artists and licensed artworks, to rotate every four months, on each digital billboard. Body Politic, the first City of West Hollywood commission for MIMA, represents the first time the City will do a simultaneous takeover of multiple digital billboards on the Sunset Strip with one singular artwork at the top of each hour.

About Nancy Baker Cahill – Nancy Baker Cahill (born 1970) is an American interdisciplinary media artist and expanded filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She has created immersive augmented reality (AR) and virtual (VR) experiences, video installations, and blockchain projects, often rooted in drawing. Her work frequently merges technology and public art, drawing upon both ecofeminist land art and the history of political interventions to examine systemic power, body autonomy, civics, and climate crisis, among other issues. She is the founder and director of 4th Wall, a free AR public art platform focused on public engagement, critical social practice, and site interventions. Her work appears in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; RFC Art Collection, Miami, FL; and 0x Collection, Prague, CZ. https://nancybakercahill.com/

About the West Hollywood Moving Image Media Art program – The Moving Image Media Art Program (MIMA) is a City of West Hollywood exhibition series administered by the City’s Arts Division, as part of its Art on the Outside Program, and is presented with the Sunset Arts and Advertising Program. MIMA (me-ma) is a digital art program presenting moving image media artworks on multiple digital platforms at various locations along Sunset Boulevard. The program features licensed and newly commissioned, moving image digital artworks created by an inclusive roster of emerging, mid-career, and world-famous artists, filmmakers, and digital visionaries. MIMA is a fluid framework to engage diverse perspectives, challenge the status quo, and recommit the Sunset Strip as dynamic, artistic, and cultural destination within the rich context of the City of West Hollywood. The exhibition series offers artists the opportunity, and the funding, to create immediate, remarkable, and ambitious works of art that engage with the unique visual landscape of the world-famous Sunset Strip, and experiment with state-of-the-art technology of high-definition digital signage. MIMA enables artists to occupy, contest, and play with boundaries and uses of public space and manifest moments of connection and awe.

Artists exhibited in the program are selected from the MIMA Prequalified List, a rolling, open-call for moving image media artists, curators, and non-profit arts organizations, with applications reviewed bi-annually by the City of West Hollywood’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission, in May and November. The MIMA Prequalified List includes a diverse list of artists of all career levels; from emerging to internationally recognized. Visit www.weho.org/community/arts-and-culture/visual-arts/mima for more detailed information.

The City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division delivers a broad array of arts programs including Art on the Outside (temporary public art), Arts Grants, City Poet Laureate, Drag Laureate, Free Theatre in the Parks, Human Rights Speakers Series, Library Exhibits, Summer + Winter Sounds, Urban Art (permanent public art), WeHo Pride Arts Festival, and WeHo Reads. For more information about City of West Hollywood arts programming, please visit www.weho.org/arts.  

For more information on the City of West Hollywood’s MIMA program, please contact Rebecca Ehemann, City of West Hollywood Arts Manager, at rehemann@weho.org or at (323) 848-6846. For all Body Politic and Nancy Baker Cahill media inquiries, please contact Florie Hutchinson at (415) 515-4696 or florie.hutchinson@gmail.com.

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For reporters and members of the media seeking additional information about the City of West Hollywood, please contact the City of West Hollywood’s Public Information Officer, Sheri A. Lunn, at (323) 848-6391 or slunn@weho.org.