This Building is on Fire

It certainly was not the first time New Yorkers saw flashing lights atop the Empire State Building; but, it was the first time the lights danced as they did, synchronised to Alicia Keys’ singing two of her songs, ‘Girl on Fire’ and ‘Empire State of Mind’, appropriately selected for the launch of the building's newly installed programmable LED lighting system. Amidst the ambient glow of the surrounding buildings, bright orange and red hues shifted to blue, purple, and yellow with the pulsating rhythm of the music. The colours mixed and faded into one another, rippling across the façade and rising up and down the antennae to Keys’ voice. As Megan Garber (2012) of The Atlantic described it, it was like ‘a fireworks show, with the illumination in question coming not from controlled explosions, but from controlled LEDS’. It was a firework-like show that in its apparent silence could be completely ignored or misinterpreted by thousands while remaining a formidable centre of attention for those who knew what to look and listen for by tuning in to the synchronised audio on a local radio station. Furthermore, the show rippled out into the night (and the days thereafter) on screens of those near and far via YouTube (see Figure 3-1), Instagram, and Twitter, and Facebook.