Endangered Species (Including Cecil the Lion) Projected Onto the Empire State Building

in Art | August 2nd, 2015 4 Comments

Any­one with a Face­book or Twit­ter account last week could­n’t avoid hear­ing about Wal­ter James Palmer, the Min­neso­ta den­tist who alleged­ly went tro­phy hunt­ing in Zim­bab­we and killed Cecil the Lion, a local favorite who had been ille­gal­ly lured away from a pro­tect­ed wildlife pre­serve. I won’t say any­thing more about it, oth­er than that you can sign a peti­tion to get Palmer extra­dit­ed to Zim­bab­we and let him defend his actions to local author­i­ties.

Mean­while, back in New York City, two artists Travis Threlkel and Louie Psi­hoyos were get­ting ready to turn The Empire State build­ing into a Noah’s Ark of Endan­gered Ani­mals. And that’s exact­ly what hap­pened on Sat­ur­day night. Plac­ing “40 stacked, 20,000-lumen pro­jec­tors on the roof of a near­by build­ing,” Threlkel and Psi­hoyos pro­ject­ed an array of endan­gered ani­mals “onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide cov­er­ing 33 floors,” reports The New York Times. You can see pho­tos of the ani­mals over at the Rac­ing Extinc­tion Twit­ter stream. Touch­ing­ly, there was an homage to Cecil the Lion. A video from the Times appears above; anoth­er from The New York­er below.

To learn more about how Project Map­ping works, and to see oth­er exam­ples of Threlkel’s work, see the videos on this page.

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Comments (4)
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  • Sky says:
    August 2, 2015 at 5:42 pm

    What of the entire herd of gazelle, Cecil (the ser­i­cal killer) wiped out, there was, Grace the gazelle, Gabriel­la the gazelle,Genevieve the gazelle,giselle the gazelle, Glo­ria the gazelle, Gina the gazelle, Gia the gazelle, Gia­da (And she could sure­ly cook!) the gazelle, and a host of oth­ers, all to be for­got­ten.

    Reply
  • sautsitumorang says:
    August 3, 2015 at 1:27 am

    O, so do you think the late Cecil killed them for tro­phy hunt­ing and fun like the high­ly edu­cat­ed Amer­i­can den­tist, Sky?

    Reply
  • Hanoch says:
    August 3, 2015 at 7:33 am

    It would behoove those who would jump to extra­dite some­one to Zim­bab­we over the death of a lion to exer­cise some judg­ment. Do the “peti­tion­ers” have any idea what kind of laws exist in Zim­bab­we and whether a tru­ly fair tri­al would occur there? I won­der whether the peti­tion­ers even care. No doubt these same peo­ple, who feel such empa­thy for an ani­mal, take no umbrage over the end­ing of a human baby’s life before it reach­es term. We live in an increas­ing­ly moral­ly upside-down world.

    Reply
  • Mona says:
    August 12, 2015 at 2:14 pm

    The cit­i­zens of Zim­bab­we con­sid­er lions a dead­ly preda­tor that steals their food and kills their chil­dren. When ani­mals are hunt­ed for tro­phy the rest of the ani­mal is donat­ed to local vil­lages as food. When the cit­i­zens of Zim­bab­we were asked how they felt about Amer­i­ca get­ting involved in the cur­rent debate they were excit­ed because they thought they were being helped (Zim­bab­we suf­fers from 30% unem­ploy­ment). When they found out it was about Cecil the Lion, they said, “Who? Who cares about a lion?” I hope we don’t make our­selves look stu­pid. We don’t need anoth­er suf­fer­ing coun­try to view Amer­i­cans as cal­lous and igno­rant. On the oth­er hand, nice dis­play ESB!

    Reply

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