Plasma TVs to Debut in Square

The panhandlers, performers, and protestors of Harvard Square will soon compete with a new fusion of art and advertisement to win the attention of tourists and townies alike.

On November 1, Lumen Eclipse—a local design and advertising company—will install two 42-inch plasma televisions on opposite sides of the Cambridge Office for Tourism’s information kiosk in the pit.

One of the displays will show various video art pieces, while the other will display silent advertisements for local businesses.

Lumen Eclipse co-founder Rory P. Keohane said that because the Square attracts heavy traffic and upholds a tradition of street performance, it makes for an ideal place to display art in a different environment.

“There’s a lack of outlets for this medium outside of the art gallery, where it’s often only people who are aware of the medium that see it,” Keohane said. “We wanted to make an outlet in a public venue where artists could display their work.”

The video art pieces will also have audio portions, which will be projected by a sound system with a projection range of six- to eight-feet.

Bryan L. Morrissey, an engineer with Brown Innovations, the Boston company that developed the system, said that background noise should drown out the sound for pedestrians walking outside of the radius.

“The microphone listens to ambient noise then sets the volume of the speaker at an appropriate level, so it can be heard but is not overwhelming,” said Morrissey.

Each month, there will be 12 video art pieces rotating on the displays, one of which will be commissioned by Lumen Eclipse and centered on life in Cambridge.

The first commissioned piece is by an Icelandic artist, Pall Thayer, who used photographs of Cambridge to create his piece. According to Keohane, both artists from foreign places—like Iceland and Brazil—as well as locals artists submitted work.

Another of the inaugural pieces for the display was created by Nell B. Breyer, a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Breyer described her work as examining “how we perceive motion and how we can use video processing to focus our attention on specific facets of our perception.”