Every year, Burning Man draws roughly 80,000 people to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. In 1994, the same year Leo Villareal began an internship at Paul Allen's Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, Calif., he attended Burning Man for the first time.
He found the communal experience fascinating. When darkness fell, for example, there was no illumination except for the Burning Man sculpture. Being in a new space where you have to find your way was an interesting challenge, except, at night, he didn't know where his tent was.
Four years later he returned with 16 strobe lights and a micro-controller, which he programmed with simple code and installed on his tent. He didn't think of it as an artwork, just a utilitarian device to get him back to his sleeping bag in the dark.
"It was the first moment I connected software and light in space, and I realized this thing was very potent," Mr. Villareal said during a recent conversation at Guild Hall, where his exhibition, "Celestial Garden," opened last weekend. "You could see it from miles away. Even though it was a tiny bit of information, there was kind of a language to it."
That started him off on light sculpture, and since then he has created monumental public artworks throughout the world, including, perhaps most dramatically, "Illuminated River" in London. Mr. Villareal designed and programmed subtly moving sequences of LED light on nine of that city's bridges, ranging from the historic Westminster Bridge, whose current version dates from 1862, to Millennium Bridge, a pedestrian span opened in 2000.
The international competition for that project included such notable architects as David Adjaye and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, among others. "My goal was to reveal the beauty that was already there on these bridges and understand them from a historical perspective, including how they've been illuminated previously." The longest public art project in the world, it will last for at least 10 years.
Growing up in Texas and Mexico, Mr. Villareal didn't take art classes until he went to boarding school in Rhode Island at 16. "Everybody had to take drawing, which I love," he said, and he began to do set design. He enrolled at Yale in 1986 with a plan to study art history, and continued with set design until he took an installation sculpture class.
"I thought it was amazing, because I don't need a play, I don't need actors, I can create environments with sound and light and do all those things." His first sculpture teacher was Alice Aycock, who told him, "Everything's available to you as an artist, and you can make anything."
"That changed my path." He ended up majoring in sculpture.
Mr. Villareal got an Apple II Plus computer when he was 13. "I had been interested in technology, but when I was in college it was really for writing papers. It was nothing you could be creative with."
However, that abiding interest in science led him to graduate school at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, which opened up a world of otherwise out-of-reach technology. He went to work at the college's medical center making laparoscopic surgery simulations, he said, "to get my hands on the technology." Also at N.Y.U., he learned about programming, video-editing, and 3-D graphics. In 1994, after earning a master's in professional studies, which combines a traditional graduate degree such as an M.A. or an M.S. with specialized industry-specific skills, he took the internship in Palo Alto, and four years later returned to New York to establish his first studio.
Since then, "It’s been 20-plus years of me developing my own custom software," the sculptor said. "I quickly exceeded my coding ability. I found a lot of creative coders to work with over the years, and we made bespoke tools I’m using to create my work. It’s not some program I’m downloading and using, it’s really something we’re making. We’ve done the same with engineers. We’ve made our own custom LED boards, our own circuits, our own control systems. We've really gone down the rabbit hole."
Another of his site-specific projects is "Bay Lights," a 1.8-mile-long installation of 25,000 white LED lights on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge that opened in 2013. "Christo wrote a really nice letter of support for 'Bay Lights.' It helped us make it happen." Originally a temporary installation, it became permanent in 2016.
"Stars," an installation in the arched windows of the Brooklyn Academy of Music from 2007, was supposed to be up for three months, but it's still in place.
The technology behind Mr. Villareal's installations might be complex, but the works themselves are accessible. "For me, keeping the technology in check is the most important thing, because it's very easy for technology to dazzle and overwhelm, and suddenly you're not in the realm of art anymore, you're making spectacle."
He is committed to abstraction in his work, he said, "and letting people come to their own respective conclusions. People can engage with it whether they know about the history of art or technology. Those are aspects people can dig into if they want to, but they don't need to."
"Celestial Garden" was created for the Guild Hall exhibition. Mr. Villareal had been working with a large-scale video array in his studio when the opportunity arose. "It was very exciting to be a part of the renovation and to bring my work here."
The display, which is approximately 10 feet high and 28 feet wide, consists of LEDs, custom software, electrical hardware, steel, and a vinyl diffusion layer that softens the light. The installation also includes zero-gravity chairs, designed by the sculptor to distribute body weight equally so a viewer can "sort of leave your body, in a way."
Central to "Celestial Garden" and to his work in general is the idea, inspired in part by the mathematician John Conway's work, that forms move, change, interact, and ultimately grow into complex phenomena, all without a preconceived outcome.
"There are transitions between different states," Mr. Villareal said of "Celestial Garden," "and it's all generative, it's not playing back anything that's pre-recorded. It's important to me that it's really infinite and that it's going from state to state, and then there are these other temporal effects that distort or blur and have an almost aquatic feeling." The piece, he said, is related to both the cosmos and nature.
He commented that other time-based work, such as video installations, can create anxiety, in that viewers might wonder what they missed or how long the video will be. "The viewer is off the hook with this, because it's not repeating and you're not going to miss anything, and you can just relax and enjoy and spend time with it."
The scale of the piece was influenced in part, he said, by time spent in Mexico City, where he was able to see the murals of Rufino Tamayo and Diego Rivera.
"I think it's connected to a lot of things that are probably very painterly, but also using a new form: It's an LED array, and it's using code, but I don't really care about that." Referring to the cables and hardware in the gallery, he added, "Obviously I couldn't do it without that, but it's really about the visual manifestation of the code."
Mr. Villareal and his wife, Yvonne Force Villareal, first visited the South Fork in the 1990s. After a few years in Connecticut, they discovered the North Fork, and bought a house in Orient 18 years ago. "A lot of our artist friends were there, and it was just kind of low key -- the quiet, the farm stands, the food culture, and the water."
Especially while spending months there during the pandemic, his surroundings influenced his work. "I'm very interested that I can create this sense of wonder and awe using an LED array and a piece of vinyl and some computers, because you wouldn't think of those things as being able to connect with nature."
"Celestial Garden" can be seen at Guild Hall through Oct. 15.
