SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Words Like Love: Alphaville, First Scenes, a temporary public art project by Alejandro Cesarco. Cesarco's project is the second artwork commissioned through SculptureCenter's art education program Public Process.

Words Like Love: Alphaville, First Scenes is installed on a 14-by-48-foot billboard over Jackson Avenue at the intersection of Queens Plaza in Long Island City. The work is a textual interpretation of the opening scene of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), an iconic science fiction/noir film that describes a futuristic dystopian society controlled by a supercomputer. Re-translating the film back into a screenplay, Cesarco's project stresses the descriptive and prescriptive function of scripts: the text in this case is made to both mirror its surroundings and, to some extent, dictate the reality we see before us. Through its prominent placement over a busy intersection in Queens, the billboard points to how texts mediate public space and social life while locating critical and resistant capacities in the acts of reading and interpretation.

The project is curated by SculptureCenter Executive Director and Chief Curator, Mary Ceruti.