The artwork comprises ten high resolution screens and speakers installed in the colonnade of Avery Fisher Hall, facing the fountain at the heart of Lincoln Center. It runs day and night, but is best seen at dusk or afterwards.

The 10 screens in the artwork each represent an instrument of the orchestra. These screens work out how to play their own parts of the coda of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony before they then coordinate their parts to perform it together.

Enlightenment is a live performance—the artwork generates itself in real-time, with results too big to store even if it were the artists’ intent to do so. It recreates itself every 35 minutes or so before starting over again. By the end of this run, Enlightenment will be the highest resolution live digital artwork ever created, animating 41 million pixels in real time and, over the course of its five-week installation, generating 125 million frames of animation—more than 18 petabytes of video data.