Client: Into the Great Wide Open

Location: Vlieland, Netherlands

Completion date: 2010

Artwork budget: $20,000

Project Team

Art Consultant

Caroline Euser

Into the Great Wide Open

Artist

Titia Ex

Overview

The Waiting, a site specific, computer animated installation. ‘The Waiting is the hardest part´, is a song by Tom Petty, who also wrote ITGWO, the festival’s title song. Forty red LED lights float just below the surface of a pond and blink randomly, short – long – short. The spectator’s close attention was drawn by the continuous random blinking; endlessly waiting for a pattern never to emerge, knowing all was there. The unreadable rhythm of this atmospheric lighting evoked a sense of infinity and and a sense of life, an effect that is disconcerting and exhilarating at the same time.

Goals

Titia Ex’s work is all about the area of tension that light creates in relation to her audience within a specific environment. Light can not only convey the dynamics of a space, but also the tranquillity. It is a quest to find the rhythm - people in motion, contemplative or en route somewhere else - and how to then give this rhythm a poetic echo. The enigmatic location has inspired Titia Ex to produce The Waiting, a work of light art named after ´The Waiting is the hardest part´, a number by Tom Petty who also wrote Into The Great Wide Open, the festival’s title song.

Process

The Waiting was a temporary work. I was free to chose a location on the Island. In consultation with the forest ranger and the curator I was allowed the use the pound.
Not only the visitors from the festival, but also the inhabitants came over the experiance the site.