In 1998, when the neighborhood of Charlestown was beset by violence and addiction, the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko mounted an exhibition at the Bunker Hill Monument, projecting the images and voices of residents who had lost loved ones to crime. For three nights, the stories of mothers or brothers of victims were projected onto the famous monument, challenging that neighborhood’s prevailing “code of silence” in a profound expression of what Wodiczko called our “universal communicative rights.”
But what if the images expressed this way are profane, satirical, and explicitly political? What if they shine the words “Pay Trump bribes here” right onto the Trump International Hotel building in Washington, D.C., or if they cast images of Donald Trump with Jeffrey Epstein onto Windsor Castle, timed to President Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom? What if the images are hateful or antisemitic? Does free expression override property rights?
These are the questions the filmmaker Tom Clement asks in his short documentary “Projecting Protest,” which screened recently at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The film follows a handful of guerilla artists as they shine provocative messages onto public and private spaces. Authorities try to stop them, citing regulations against trespassing or vague “public nuisance” ordinances. But the legal status of these ephemeral protest signs is largely unsettled. “It’s kind of the Wild West,” Clement said in a panel discussion after the screening. “You do what you can get away with.”
Light projections are fleeting, like writing in sand. You can’t really call the tactic vandalism or even graffiti, nor is it trespassing if the people doing the projecting are on a public sidewalk. In London, four people were arrested in connection with the Trump-Epstein projections, but no charges were brought.
Advances in technology have created smaller, cheaper, and more portable projectors, and the messages have become common at No Kings rallies and other protests. The Democratic National Committee used projections to troll the Trump-Vance ticket ahead of the vice presidential debate last year.
Closer to home, a small group of activists called “Silence Dogood” (after Benjamin Franklin’s pen name as a youthful Boston publishing apprentice) has been shining pointed commentary on the state’s many patriotic monuments, from the Old North Church to Plymouth Rock. One of the first, in March, responded to the threat by Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, to “bring hell” to Boston for resisting the administration’s immigration policies. Drawing on the city’s history of fighting tyranny and injustice, the group used a 16,000-lumen projector to shine defiant messages onto the Old State House. One quoted Mayor Michelle Wu, who was just about to testify before Congress. “Boston doesn’t back down,” it read.
In an interview, Diane Dwyer, Silence Dogood’s founder, said the messages are “a rallying cry to the region to find pride in this legacy of dissent.” The region’s many historic buildings, which she calls “witnesses,” are a canvas for rethinking revolution, especially poignant given current commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. “The inclination is to celebrate these moments,” Dwyer said, but with the current state of political crisis, it’s also important to remember “how dissent and conflict was so present in 1776.”
Generally, projection activists lean left. But a few years ago a group of white supremacists in Florida began projecting antisemitic images, including a Nazi swastika entwined with a Christian cross, and worse, onto buildings in Jacksonville and elsewhere. In his film, Clement talks to Josh Nunes, an avowed neo-Nazi, who makes the case for the projections regardless of whom they offend. “It’s just another form of free speech,” he said through a mask.
This is where First Amendment champions often get stymied: how to accept what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1929 called “freedom for the thought that we hate.” First Amendment law in the United States (so far) protects even odious and hateful speech unless it incites an “imminent threat of danger.” But in Florida, the antisemitic signs led to Governor Ron DeSantis signing a law prohibiting any projections onto buildings without the written consent of a building’s owner. Legal scholars are unsure whether it would pass constitutional muster if challenged. Some, including Harvard law professor Maureen Brady, argue that it’s a simple matter of property law catching up to technology. Others see it as a far more fundamental attack on a basic American right.
Let’s hope it never gets to our current Supreme Court, which has been hostile to so much legal precedent. Because if the government starts deciding who can light up the night, things may get very dark indeed.
Renée Loth is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.