Saturday night, from 9:00pm-12:00am, New Yorkers will be able to spot endangered animals projected onto the Empire State Building.
On Saturday, using 40 stacked, 20,000-lumen projectors on the roof of a building on West 31st Street, Mr. Threlkel and Mr. Psihoyos, director of the Oscar-winning documentary “The Cove,” will be illuminating the night from 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. with a looping reel showing what Mr. Psihoyos calls a “Noah’s ark” of animals. A snow leopard, a golden lion tamarin and manta rays, along with snakes, birds and various mammals and sea creatures will be projected onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide covering 33 floors of the southern face of the Empire State Building — and beyond, thanks to cellphones and Internet connections.
A representation by Ron Robinson of a snow leopard projected on the Empire State Building, an image that is to become a reality on Saturday night as part of the event “Projecting Change: The Empire State Building,” about dwindling animal populations. Credit Joel Sartore and Ron Robinson/Obscura Digital
Although the concept began years ago, the timing of the show for raising awareness couldn't be more perfect..
Four years ago, Mr. Psihoyos’s Oceanic Preservation Society hired Mr. Threlkel’s San Francisco company, Obscura Digital, to put on elaborate light shows to help draw attention to the alarming rate at which species are dying out in what Mr. Psihoyos contends is Earth’s sixth mass extinction. The men began discussing “the most dramatic thing we could do to get the world to know about what we’re losing,” Mr. Psihoyos said. They wanted to use the photography of Mr. Psihoyos’s colleagues at National Geographic, incorporate a musical element and project the images on a newsworthy facade.
The project is coming to fruition at the end of a week when wild animals have been prominent in the news, among them endangered elephants, whose plight was emphasized in a speech President Obama gave in Kenya announcing restrictions on the sale of African elephant ivory, and Cecil the lion, a tagged animal lured from a wildlife preserve in Zimbabwe, shot by an American hunter with a crossbow, then tracked and ultimately killed.
The photography of the animals is stunning, as seen in some of the images already released to the press:
A banded palm civet from the Cincinnati Zoo, the last of its kind in a North American zoo. Credit Joel Sartore.
A five-month-old mandrill in Equatorial Guinea. Credit Joel Sartor
An oceanic manta ray with a wingspan exceeding five yards hovers over an Indonesian reef that is a designated sanctuary. Credit Shawn Heinrichs
The kaiser spotted newt, which is endangered in Iran. Credit Joel Sartore
Koalas. According to racingextinction.com, only 100,000 remain. Credit Joel Sartore
A bald eagle named Bensar at the George Miksch Sutton Avian Research Center in Bartlesville, Okla. Credit Joel Sartore
According to eccorazzi:
Psihyos and Threlkel hope the event inspires a movement “to preserve the real treasure of our beautiful planet: its life.”
They’re asking people to participate live by following #RacingExtinction on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
More information on the project can be found at the
Racing Extinction website.