On the anniversary of Sept. 11 every year, two beams of light shoot into the sky to commemorate the fallen twin towers, and yesterday night was no different. The beams, a public art installation called "Tribute in Light," was co-created by Paul Myoda, assistant professor of visual art.
"The very first impulse was to put the buildings back," Myoda wrote in an email to The Herald, reflecting on his initial motivation for the display. "We could still feel them, and see them in our mind's eye."
When "Tribute in Light" was first installed, Myoda remembers being struck by both the illuminative and emotional intensity of the display, he wrote.
The creators requested that the astronauts in a NASA shuttle mission take a picture of the display from space, but since the mission was out of range, the creators decided to create suppositional images in different orbits.
"I really came to see the tribute from space," Myoda wrote. "It is like some baffling Morse code which sends out an annual message of dashes, dots and emptiness."
"At the most basic level it is a shout or cry or attempt to simply reach out and say: we are still here," he wrote.
