Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art
Part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide
Featuring the work of more than 16 artists and designers, including Refik Anadol, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mika Tajima, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, and others at the forefront of data visualization.
On view September 19, 2024 through February 15, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 19, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
A wide-ranging and multilayered exhibition exploring how contemporary art, design and culture respond to big data’s impact on daily life. The exhibition focuses on nuanced concepts about data and data visualization that include Data Humanism, Invisible Data and Data Environments. Giorgia Lupi, represented in the exhibition by a large-scale installation created in collaboration with Ehren Shorday, advocates a humanistic approach. Lupi coined the term Data Humanism in reaction to computer-generated graphs, pie charts and generic human icons used by mainstream media in the ‘90s. Hormonium, by Rafael Lozano Hemmer, illustrates chronobiology by combining nature forms with text and human time- and life-cycles.
Invisible Data references the unseen nature of data and the influence of data biases. The Library of Missing Data Sets, by Mimi Ọnụọha, highlights forgotten or traditionally overlooked communities. Sarah Morris’s Sound Graph Series both explore the deep relationship between sound and visual representation. Mika Tajima’s Archive of Feelings is the artist’s first-ever NFT project that utilizes a custom algorithm to process text-based social media data and forecast collective emotions.
Data Environments works express concern for Earth’s current state and climate. Cloud Prototype by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is a large-scale sculpture formed by the study of weather systems and compilations of numerical data from thunderclouds. Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg’s Wind Map depicts, in real time, wind patterns related to geographic locations throughout the United States. Pod Worlds, by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, simulates—using crochet—coral reef ecosystems threatened by natural and human causes. Refik Anadol’s AI data paintings, California Landscapes: Generative Studies, radically compile and re-visualize clusters of publicly available images sourced from select locations to examine humans’ experiences of nature.
Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art is organized by Julie Joyce, director, ArtCenter Galleries; Stephen Nowlin, artist, curator, and founding director of ArtCenter’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery; and Christina Valentine, curator, ArtCenter Galleries.
Seeing the Unseeable is among the more than 70 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present.
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery
ArtCenter College of Design
1700 Lida Street
Pasadena, CA 91103
Gallery Hours:
Wednesday to Saturday, 12 pm - 5 pm.
Reservations recommended.
Contact
Exhibitions@artcenter.edu
Works in the Exhibition
Artists in the Exhibition
- Refik Anadol
- Laurie Frick
- Hyojung Seo
- George Legrady
- Rafael Lozano Hemmer
- Giorgia Lupi and Ehren Shorday
- Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
- Sarah Morris
- Data to Discovery: Santiago Lombeyda and Hillary Mushkin
- Mimi Ọnụọha
- Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt
- Linnéa Gabriella Spransy
- Mika Tajima
- Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
- Peggy Weil
- Christine Wertheim, Margaret Wertheim and The Institute for Figuring
Why AxS Podcast
Join us as we investigate the powers of art and science–and the extraordinary, unexpected outcomes when the two fields intersect.
Events
September 19, 2024
6–8 p.m.
Williamson Gallery
Opening Reception
Free and open to the public.
October 4–6
PST Art: Pasadena Weekend
Pasadena institutions have aligned their opening hours and coordinated their schedules to make it easy for you to experience all things PST ART in the city.
October 5–6
noon to sunset
Sculpture Garden
and Sinclaire Pavilion
Sunstar
An art/science work by Liliane Lijn, artist, and John Vallerga, astrophysicist at UC Berkeley Space Science Lab, Sunstar is a large-scale and far-reaching daytime installation sited on the historic 150-foot Solar Tower on Mount Wilson. Using engineered glass prisms and specially designed code, a spray of diffracted sunlight is projected to specific locations, making the solar spectrum visible just at the meeting point of earth and sky in the form of a sparkling star. On loan to Mount Wilson Observatory, Sunstar will be beaming on ArtCenter’s Hillside Campus over the October 5 and 6 weekend, and will be visible from the sculpture garden and the grassy area of Sinclaire Pavilion.
An array of six prisms, Sunstar takes incoming sunlight and refracts it, bending the light and spreading it into a spectrum–all the colors of the rainbow. It will be mounted near the top of the Observatory’s 150-foot Solar Telescope Tower. With motion controls, it can be remotely directed to project the spectrum to a specific point in the Los Angeles basin. An observer below will see an intense point of light in a single wavelength, shining like a brilliant jewel from the ridgeline of Mount Wilson, 5,800 feet above in the San Gabriel Mountains. The prisms can be moved to change the color of light an observer sees, or the observer can walk in one direction or another to change the color. In this case, the observer is actually walking across a giant spectrum some 250 yards long. While still very bright, at the great distances involved, it is perfectly safe to look at a single wavelength of sunlight.
October 6, 2024
2–6:30 p.m.
Ahmanson Theater
György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science
Premiere screening and conversation with the director.
2 p.m. Ahmanson Theater
4:30-6:30 p.m. Reception and light refreshments to follow at the Williamson Gallery.
Join ArtCenter faculty Ramone Muñoz for a brief conversation with filmmaker Márton Oroz on the Los Angeles debut of his seminal documentary.
A prominent figure in the mid-20th-century art and design scene, György Kepes (1906–2001) was a pivotal contributor to the international development of art and design theory and the application of design principles in various fields. As the architect of the Light Workshop at the New Bauhaus/School of Design in Chicago in 1937 and as the founder and first director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT in 1967, Kepes’ enterprise was to fill the gap between the humanities and the sciences.
Documentary director Márton Orosz is the curator of the collection of photography and media arts at the Museum of Fine Arts–Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest. He has been publishing widely on new media, kinetic and concrete art, photography and film history.
The György Kepes: Interthinking Art + Science film premiere is a collaboration between ArtCenter’s Williamson Gallery and Fulcrum Arts.
