Write Sky finally takes flight

On the edge of the Reading Viaduct in Philly’s Chinatown North section, local artist Dave Kyu stands with a faulty bullhorn and addresses the dozens surrounding him. In the audience this Sunday morning are friends, family, collaborators, photographers, several dogs and some children, including a kid in a full pirate costume. He’s relaying to these onlookers the details of the Empire State Building-sized letters which will soon be hanging above us and much of the city: “The planes are flying at 10,000 feet. Philadelphia airspace is controlled up until 8,000 feet. They fly at 10,000 feet so I didn’t have to get permission for this to happen.” For almost everyone here, this day has been a long time coming.

 Last September, I wrote a cover story on Kyu’s Write Sky project, a planned skywriting—technically, skytyping—event where messages written by five local groups would be broadcasted over Chinatown and visible for a 15-mile radius.  

Funded by the Asian Arts Initiative, Write Sky was envisioned as a way to bring together the budding Chinatown North neighborhood, which was still struggling with its identity. After Kyu came up with the idea of canvassing the troposphere, a call was placed throughout the area, with five groups joining together to pick three unifying messages: the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School (FACTS), Roman Catholic High School, Friends of The Rail Park, the Artists of 319, and the Hive76 hackerspace.

Unfortunately, due to schedule delays, the limited amount of skytyping teams, and the high price of renting a team of airplanes, the event was postponed that September. After hammering out the details with a new team of pilots, eight months later on May 10, Write Sky had to be delayed because of rain. On September 6 of this year, the event was delayed yet again due to a poor weather forecast, which turned out to be mostly incorrect. (That morning, Kyu tweeted, “Stupid perfect day.”)

A few days later, Kyu sent out the following email/ultimatum: “After now THREE cancellations, Write Sky will have just one more chance to write our messages into the neighborhood sky. Sunday, September 14th will be the last date I will pursue for this project. All the work of the project, hanging on the whim of the atmospheric pressure... How dramatic, no?”

Fortunately, it worked out in Write Sky’s favor.

***

Far off in the blue sky, a small group of black dots begins leaving trails of canola oil. These white puffs begin to form letters—think of a giant dot matrix printer—and soon, the heartfelt messages from the residents down below. Kyu stands among the members of the project with their heads staring straight up. “Once it started,” he later tells me, “I realized I have no clue what it looks like. I’d been working towards this thing for a year and a half and once it started, it’s like, ‘That’s what that looks like? That’s cool!’”

he first message, which was repeated due to some first time cloud coverage, was written by the Friends of the Rail Park: “WHEN YOU WISH UPON A PARK.” Member Sarah McEneaney explains that the group “considered more particular things, like the name of the organization or [their] URL, but decided to take a more poetic, interesting route” in showing support for their long-awaited green space.

As the planes loop around the tops of the city’s skyscrapers, the second message—from Roman Catholic and Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School—begins to emerge: “SCIENTIA (Latin for “knowledge”), followed by Zheng Yi (the Mandarin character for “justice”), then IT TAKES A VILLAGE”. As FACTS’ Annie Huynh later detailed: “For us, we wanted to have an education-focused message and we wanted a Chinese character that kind of captured what our school’s all about, as well as paying respects to the neighborhood of Chinatown.”

The final message—a collaboration between Hive76 and the Artists of 319—is displayed above us: “STILL HERE.” It was the shortest message and the one open to the most interpretation. Sarah Kate Burgess of 319 later elaborated, “We started thinking of text messages. That’s our general means of communication now, in terms of small messages.” The result, she said, was a “very ambiguous message that also talks about the medium itself and how it’s splintering off into little bits of smoke.” Hive76’s Chris Thompson also spoke on their intentions: “We tried to think of this as a really good art project, not just a chance to put a message in the sky.”

Each airborne note sticks around for roughly 10 minutes, before it forever dissipates. After snapping photos and tweeting them out, the crowd applauds as the planes fly out of sight. Grabbing the bullhorn once again, Kyu jokes, “I just want to give a huge heartfelt thank you to everybody who did a variety of rain dances and prayed to their respective gods and goddesses.” (He admits later that he’s “never working with nature again.”) He then calls up members of each group to discuss their artistic statements, before sincerely thanking everyone involved. Even though the entire skytyping event lasted about 20 minutes, no one is disappointed.

***

So what’s it like to finally see this project unfold after a year and a half? “It was gonna be a relief either way, just because this was the last day we we’re considering,” Kyu admits. “But now that it’s partly executed, it’s like a victory.” Throughout the entirety of Write Sky’s long and once seemingly quixotic process, Kyu never stopped being its ever-hopeful, passionate leader, something he characteristically attributes to the other members: “I brought in all these great people to work on this project with the promise of skywriting and at some point, it went from trying to get skywriting to happen for myself into trying to do it for everybody else who had this dream with me.”

Soon after the flight, Kyu begins receiving text messages from friends and colleagues (“All of West Philly is freaking out!”). Kyu’s wife Ilyssa excitedly tells him that people around the entire city are Instagramming pictures from their vantage points. Now, Write Sky is in the hands of the thousands of unknowing city residents surprised by the giant art piece. “The hope for that audience is that they’ll get curious about it and do some research,” Kyu explains.

“Then they start learning about the intents of the project, start learning about the people who worked on it. Then you start to change the narrative of this neighborhood. ‘Cause the media narrative kind of defines the future of the neighborhood. To show that there are so many people working on the future here, is ultimately, what we want to communicate through this kind of relocated curiosity.”

As the crowd hangs out and eats food—including some cooked by Kyu’s mother on the grill—I notice that the wind begins to build up, leaving the once-blue sky a mess of streaky white clouds. The visibility has gotten significantly worse.

The planes, it seems, flew over just in time.

A video of the day: