Rockefeller Center -- the plaza, the rink, the gardens -- is the site of numerous special events during the year, and for the past several years has featured work by major artists, in collaboration with the Public Art Fund.

This installation of Nam June Paik's "Transmission" is from last summer. The Rube first noticed the old cars (Fig 3) and thought it was the auto show, but then saw they had been entirely painted silver, even the tires ... ruining them for the collector's market. Then he read about the lasers, and came back a few nights later to take these shots. The lasers were not as spectacular as he expected them to be. They never are. According to a Village Voice article, it had been planned they would be projected on the fountain behind Prometheus, but that had to be turned off because of the drought; then they wanted to project them on a wall of mist, but the restaurant (set up in the rink area) objected to that.

The Rube stood there for a while and and tried to figure out the pattern of the lasers as they jumped from one "radio tower" to the next -- it was ike watching one of those Rube Goldberg machines with the metal balls that go down tracks and ring bells and the like. (There is still one of those in the Port Authority which he might go down and shoot for this series.)

The silver cars played music from their radios.