Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art

View the PST ART: Art and Science Collide exhibition, Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art.

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.

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.