Lincoln Center has commissioned an artwork to be displayed on the southern facade of Avery Fisher Hall for this year's Mostly Mozart Festival, center officials announced.

Digital artists Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser of the OpenEnded Group, which created last summer's artwork Enlightenment, returned to the festival to produce this year's public display.

Eight light boxes, each positioned below a banner, make up the work presented along the hall's colonnade. Called Breath, it is accompanied by computerized music and dynamic lighting, and so viewed best after sundown.

The lighting reacts to the music by illuminating and coloring specific areas of the banners, unveiling new patterns.

The banners, positioned above the colonnade, are lit from across the plaza, and depict magnified extensions of the light box visualizations.

Thematically unique, each light box has complex, printed computer-generated diagrams illustrating patterns — in the form of words, metaphors, musical scores and imagery — related to sacred music and its sources.

When viewed from right to left, Breath, follows a progression of musical subjects from collective to solitary expression. These eight themes were chosen to reflect the festival's exploration of spirituality this year. They are, in said right-to-left order: Starling (birdsong), Breathing, Psalms, Adam's Fall (Hildegard von Bingen), Masses I, Masses II, Mozart's Requiem and Beethoven.

Recordings of Hildegard von Bingen's Columbia aspexit ("The dove peered in") serve as the basis for the computer-generated music; the chorus's six voices are separated and reinterpreted live by the computer, interlacing and merging each voice with the song text.

"We were extremely interested in the singing of the songs, and as 'breath' as being a key component to spiritual and mystical practices in the world," said Kaiser.

The computer-generated diagrams include those of a body breathing, illustrations of Hebrew texts, the score of Bach's Mass in B Minor and a line of text from Beethoven's Choral Fantasy.

The total effect is a sort of respiration involving music, light and thought.

Breath will be on display at Avery Fisher Hall for the 2007 Mostly Mozart Festival, running from July 14 to August 25.

By Kevin Shihoten