San Francisco’s Exploratorium will host the exhibition Glow: Discover the Art of Light this winter, Nov. 16, 2023 – Jan. 28, 2024. The exhibition will feature works from seven interdisciplinary artists like Berlin-based Robin Baumgartner, who combines tactile hardware and LEDs to create art installations and games; and Maria Constanza Ferreira, who explores visual perception through crystal patterns and structures.
Baumgartner will feature his work Quantum Jungle, which uses rings of LED lights to depict a mathematically accurate model of a quantum object. Visitors can also interact with Baumgartner's Line Wobbler. Featured in more than 30 exhibitions around the world, Line Wobbler is a one-dimensional game played with a custom controller made of a spring and an LED strip.
Ferreira’s crystal paintings, created from synthetic crystals she grows herself, will be on display in the Exploratorium’s Bechtel Gallery. To view the images, visitors must use a hand-held polarizing filter. Several of Ferreira’s short films, including Lattice (2017), VIA (2018), Righteous Energy (2019), and Hillocks (2022), will also be playing at the Microcinema in the Osher Gallery.
Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon will also be viewable in the Bechtel Gallery. The popular touring art piece is an approximately 1:500,000 scale model of the moon, equating to 7 meters in diameter, that was made using 120 dpi imagery of the moon’s surface captured by NASA with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.
Another artist displaying work at Glow is Chaco Kato, a founding director of the sustainability-focused Slow Art Collective. Kato invites viewers to meditate on color in motion with her evolving installation Color Study, which features color-changing lights and geometric patterns cast on thousands of pieces of string.
Museum mainstay Daniel Rozin will be represented by his mechanical mirrors, as experienced in his pieces Self-Centered and Self-Isolating Mirrors, which are viewable at the Exploratorium year-round. The Glow exhibit will feature Rozin’s CMY Shadow Mirror and RGB Lights Mirror, as well as the debut of a new piece, One Candle Mirror, which explores viewer participation and image creation.
Collectif Scale, the Parisian multi-disciplinary collective, is contributing its kinetic sculpture Flux to the exhibition. The sculpture’s 48 LED light bars move in accompaniment to music, creating hypnotizing patterns.
The exhibition will also showcase Sound Sculptures by MASARY Studios, a Boston-based artist collective founded in 2015. This work invites visitors to create music by arranging large, location-aware cubes on a grid. Moving these color-changing cubes along the grid axes changes the music’s pitch and rhythm.
The Exploratorium is located at Pier 15 on San Francisco’s waterfront. Tickets to the museum and Glow exhibition can be purchased at the Exploratorium website.
