A taste of the courthouse light show you’ll see at the Taste
No fireworks? No problem. Taste prepares a courthouse light show you'll have to see. Plus, West Lafayette pleads with drivers to cool it when taking construction detour shortcuts through neighborhoods
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THE LIGHT SHOW AT THE TASTE
The Taste of Tippecanoe, traditionally among the biggest of Lafayette’s summer festivals, won’t have fireworks over downtown on Saturday. But it will have plenty of lights.
A team of animators, many of them Purdue students, were putting the finishing touches this week on shows that will be projected on two sides of the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, starting at sunset, during The Art Federation’s annual celebration of food and art.
“The idea was to make it a journey – a spectacle of color and optical illusions and ideas,” said Esteban Garcia Bravo, one of the lead artists in the project, along with Aaron Zernack and Max Carlson.
HERE’S A SAMPLE …
The team also will have a series of light sculptures – each one about four to five feet tall – in the Chase Building plaza, near Second and Main streets, and on Fifth Street, near the Lahr, that will serve as centerpieces for a collaboration with the members of the Greater Lafayette Dance Collective.
Garcia Bravo, Zernack and Carlson were part of a 2016 project, the Geode Interactive Sculpture, that had light-and-sound performances on the John T. Myers Pedestrian Bridge and the Tippecanoe County Amphitheater, followed by another in 2017 at Purdue.
“What we’re doing at the Taste kind of grew out of that, just bigger,” Garcia Bravo said.
Garcia Bravo, an assistant professor of computer graphics technology at Purdue, said the artists recruited a dozen students in March to design 30-second pieces of animation. The students – from a mix of programs including art and design, computer graphics and computer science – created a 3D computer image of the Main and Fourth streets sides of the courthouse. They used that to base work that put the columns, dome and other architectural features of the 19th century courthouse as the backdrop.
Those clips were edited into 22-minute presentations. A pair of 30,000-lumen projectors, set up in buildings across Main and Fourth streets, will put the light show against the courthouse, backed by a musical score from Zernack.
“I think we did what we were hoping to do,” Garcia Bravo said. “My hope is it’s something that is amazing to see – that it brings some joy, brings some smiles.”
The light show performances will be 9:20 p.m., 10:20 p.m. and 11:20 p.m. Saturday during the Taste. Garcia Bravo said the courthouse will have a loop of animation – “sort of like a screen saver,” he said – between performances that night.
ABOUT THE TASTE: The Taste of Tippecanoe, the major fundraising event for The Arts Federation, will be 6 p.m.-midnight Saturday, June 18, in downtown Lafayette. Advance tickets are $7.50 at tasteoftippecanoe.org or $10 at the gate. Entrances: Main and Fifth; Columbia and Fourth; Columbia and Third; Third and Ferry.
The food: 8Eleven Bistro, Arni’s, Big Woods Brewery, Brown Cow Ice Cream Co., Brown’s Sugared Donuts, Cold Stone Creamery, Corn in the USA, Digby’s Pub & Patio, Dippin’ Dots, Freddy’s, Gibson’s Shaved Ice, Hoosier Daddy BBQ, Kona Ice, L-Kora Fast Food, LaTea Bubble Tea Lounge, Little Miss Cupcakes, Mama Ines Mexican Bakery, Nom Tacos & Tequila, Nothing Bundt Cakes, Porky’s BBQ, The Guac Box, Travelin’ Tom’s Coffee Truck, Trish’s Red Bird Café and Wildfire 348 Pizza.
Beer and wine: Brokerage Brewing Co., Fruitshine Wine, Hooker Corner Winery, People’s Brewing Co., Quaff On, Thieme & Wagner.
Entertainment:
Depot Stage, Second and Main streets
6 p.m.: Kyle Bledsoe
8 p.m.: Levi Riggs
10 p.m.: The Ark Band
Market Stage, Fourth Street
7 p.m.: Clave Caribe
9 p.m.: Jennie Devoe
11 p.m.: Midnight Ritmos Calientes
Mapping out the Taste: Here’s a link to a map of where to find everything.
MAYOR’S PLEA: COOL IT ON SHORTCUTS DURING FRUSTRATING CONSTRUCTION SEASON
What was the social media response the other day after West Side announced another Salisbury Street lane closure: “There were open streets in West Lafayette?”
As road work piles up this summer – “A construction season unlike any we’ve ever had,” West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis called it – the mayor made a plea Wednesday for the neighborhoods taking a big influx of drivers looking for short cuts around Salisbury, North River Road, Yeager Road, Grant Street … you know the rest.
The upshot from Dennis: Take it easy. Be ready for some delays. Your dinner will still be there when you get home.
“Oftentimes, those short cuts include neighborhoods, areas near schools, areas near parks, areas where there’s a high density of biking and pedestrian traffic, areas where kids are playing,” Dennis said during a West Lafayette Redevelopment Commission meeting that dealt with several of the major projects going on.
“Please exercise caution, move slowly,” Dennis said. “More importantly, it’s a construction season, it isn’t a new style of life here. We soon shall be done. So, be patient.”
Redevelopment commission members noted the frustration also piling up, judging by stop-and-go situations on the city’s streets and messages filling inboxes.
Police Chief Troy Harris said his department had assigned officers and traffic control warning signs to neighborhoods dealing with extra cars and speeding issues on makeshift detours.
For a full list and description of the projects West Lafayette has going, here’s the city’s site.
This week, things continued to get complicated, as crews prepared to close southbound lanes between Cumberland and Kent avenues until July 15. The closure will allow crews to remove and replace curbs that initially were built about 18 inches too tight. The city’s redevelopment commission agreed in May to put another $1.25 million into the project – originally bid at $7 million – to fix the error during the 2022 construction season, rather than haggle for now over who was to blame for the problem. (The city expects to get that money back at some point.) The error will force crews to pull out not only the curbs but also the utility lines underneath.
On Wednesday, the Redevelopment Commission signed off on an additional $124,943 to Milestone Contractors for a $2.7 million Yeager Road project. The money would add an extra weekend shift to the project, as work gets backed up waiting for utility companies to get crews to the site to do work necessary before road construction can get done. Similar issues happened on the Salisbury Street project, where a section of Grant Street work has been delayed until summer 2023, as utility crews try to keep up with a frenzied construction season propelled by COVID-era federal funding. On Yeager Road, the city is looking to get the project done rather than holding off, because it has $1 million committed to the project from the state’s Community Crossing funds that need to be used by the end of 2022 or be lost.
“We’re obviously cognizant of some of the problems,” Larry Oates, Redevelopment Commission president, said. “But at the same time, we all need to cut each other a little bit of slack. It takes time. It’s a hassle. I get it. … But at the same time, I do know that by September or October, the world is going to be a happy place, and we’re going to be able to move along nicely.”
AND … FINALLY: I’ll have more later, but for now …
CORRECTION: Wednesday’s edition included the concert announcement for country performer Justin Moore, who will be at Loeb Stadium Sept. 2. I plugged in a faulty link for tickets, which go on sale Friday at the Long Center for the Performing Arts website. It should have been: www.longpac.org. (Advance sales are happening online now, using the code “LOEB.”)
Thanks, again, to sponsor Stuart & Branigin for helping make this edition of the Based in Lafayette reporting project happen.
Tips or story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com. Also on Twitter and Instagram.
As someone who lives on a neighborhood street that sees cut-throughs from people who dead-end into a project, I appreciate the mayor asking people to stop doing that. But, I also think the mayor has no clue about the extent to which the city's lack of communication and repeated deflection of blame on outside forces leaves residents lacking confidence in leadership on all this.
When I see a quote from one of our leaders saying, "I do know that by September or October, the world is going to be a happy place", my first reaction is to ask how he knows that? Up until a few weeks ago I'm sure he knew they'd be working on Grant, until they weren't. Up until recently he knew the price for the Yeager project, and now they're having to spend extra to accelerate it. Up until a few months ago he knew the northern section of Salisbury's measurements were fine, and now they're having to rebuild a big chunk of that. Salisbury got torn up in November and I'm sure he knew they'd start work when the winter got done, and crews didn't even begin working on it until late May.
The city is telling us that everything is not in their control and therefore not their fault, that they're at the mercy of utility companies, contractors in high demand, and errors that may or may not be someone else's fault. If nothing is in their control, then how reassured should we be when someone says he "knows" things will be better by September or October?
I hope when you do a full story on ACTS, you include what that acronym STANDS for. Nobody has explained it.