Organizer Information
Times Square Arts, the highly celebrated public art arm of the Times Square Alliance, serves as a major public laboratory for contemporary art in one of the world's most iconic and highly trafficked urban centers. Operating on the conviction that risk, innovation, and creative play are foundational to civic spaces, the organization collaborates with leading contemporary artists and elite cultural institutions to experiment directly with the public realm. In a unique institutional partnership with the Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC), Times Square Arts coordinates with dozens of corporate billboard operators who generously pause their standard advertising loops to donate their electronic canvas screens for creative experimentation.
Title & Description
Midnight Moment Proposal Submission.
This long-running, premier international open call invites contemporary visual artists and moving-image makers to present finished, broadcast-ready digital works across more than 90 synchronized digital billboards spanning from 41st to 49th Streets in New York City. Synchronized seamlessly every single night of the year from 11:57 PM to Midnight, Midnight Moment stands as the world's largest and longest-running digital public art program, reaching millions of global visitors annually. The program highlights a different selected artist each month, transforming a hyper-commercial architectural landmark into an immersive, multi-screen public art collective.
The Architectural & Visual Canvas Guidelines:
Because Times Square represents a complex sensory environment rather than a flat gallery projection surface, the curatorial board stresses specific visual parameters:
- The Silent Mandate: Midnight Moment operates strictly as a silent exhibition framework. The synchronized public billboard network does not support or broadcast outdoor audio playback, meaning submitted projects must function with absolute aesthetic success in total silence.
- Monumental Scalability: Artworks play across highly varied billboard dimensions, extreme aspect ratios, and architectural curvatures. The strongest applications rely on high-contrast palettes, rich color saturation, and striking visual choreography or abstraction that maintains intense legibility when scaled up to thousands of square feet.
- Content Restrictions: Because the screens address a massive, multi-generational public audience, submissions must completely omit corporate logos, external advertisements, title cards, or embedded credits. Content containing nudity, explicit sexual themes, drug references, overt violence, expletives, religious iconography, or direct political messaging will face automatic disqualification.
Categories
Digital Art / New Media, Animation / Short Film, and Public Art
Eligibility
- Global Scope: Open to contemporary moving-image artists, digital designers, and animators worldwide.
- Production Landmark: The program focuses exclusively on fully completed moving-image artworks. In-progress drafts, works-in-progress, raw concepts, static still photographs, or sequential slide loops are completely ineligible.
Program Benefits and Artist Visibility
- Monumental Urban Exhibition: Nightly broadcast sync across 90+ synchronized electronic displays in New York City for an approximate one-month exhibition cycle (364 nights a year available).
- Mass Audience Exposure: Direct visibility to millions of international viewers, tourists, local New Yorkers, and arts professionals passing through the district.
- Formatting Engineering Scaffolding: Selected artists receive specialized technical formatting support from a private firm hired by Times Square Arts to format, slice, and optimize the digital files for smooth rendering across the multi-screen system.
- Curation Credit Slide: Times Square Arts collaborates with the laureate to compile a standard, unalterable unified credit slide appended to the close of the clip, tracking only the artist's name, title of the work, production year, and partner institution.
Fees
- Application Fee: None ($0 processing fee through the secure SlideRoom portal).
Technical Submission File Requirements
All dossiers must provide clear notes specifying whether the project functions as a single-channel or multi-channel video work. Multi-channel proposals must show a distinct visual relationship between files to scan coherently across multiple streets.
- Mandatory Digital Assets:
- Horizontal Format Video: Rendered precisely to 170 seconds (2:50) in length, at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 px or larger, encoded with no audio and no embedded text credits.
- Visual Still Stills: Exactly 1 to 3 high-resolution still images representing the project for cataloging and review.
- Optional/Recommended Assets:
- Horizontal Video Edit: 150 seconds (2:30) in runtime. (Note: The program plays works in two interspersed runtime blocks; if submitting both edits, ensure the full visual arc sits in the 150-second version, keeping the extra 20 seconds as a seamless continuation/epilogue without new thematic elements).
- Vertical Format Video: Coded to 170 seconds or 150 seconds (Target resolution: 1176 x 1464 px to assist in vertical re-framing workflows).
- Preview Reel: Summary documentation video capturing multi-channel interactions.
How to Apply?
Set up a free personal profile account on the centralized SlideRoom engine, fill out the moving-image metadata questionnaire, confirm your single- or multi-channel preference, upload your mandatory 170-second silent horizontal master video file alongside your project stills, and submit. Apply to the Times Square Midnight Moment Open Call.
Key Dates
- Application Deadline: Ongoing / Rolling Submission Framework. The portal remains permanently active for entries, with applications continuously fed into the scheduling pipeline.
- Hyperlink Validation: Any embedded video screening links or passwords included in your supplementary SlideRoom texts must remain completely active through at least September 15, 2026, to clear the panel cycle.
Location
United States, New York City, NY (Times Square District, 41st to 49th Streets).
Additional Details
The selection dynamic is overseen by a specialized, rotating public art committee comprising the core curatorial staff of Times Square Arts, corporate billboard engineers, and independent curators working across contemporary media art, graphic design, and public interventions. Due to the extraordinary volume of rolling entries processed on the digital dashboard, only artists whose moving-image projects are successfully shortlisted for active programming consideration will be directly contacted by administrators. Final choices strictly respect the organization's dedication to maintaining a diverse culture of criticism and equity across various subject matters, creative methodologies, and international traditions.