When Art and Science Collude
By Michael Rogers

Graduate student AnnMarie Polsenberg (at left) stands with artist Steve Roden in front of ear(th), the sculpture they made that was was inspired by data from an earthquake

Transforming data that tracks the movement of the earth during a major earthquake into a walk-through musical sculpture the size of a school bus requires the following: one Caltech geophysicist, a Caltech graduate student who’s a robotics expert, an internationally renowned sound artist, and 10 toy glockenspiels. Those were the ingredients in one of three Caltech-related art projects featured in the Pasadena arts festival “The Tender Land,” which debuted in October in several venues across the city. The fact that music was an integral part of the sculpture made sense, since the festival borrowed its name from an Aaron Copland opera.

The glockenspiel project, called ear(th), went on view at Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery in Pasadena on October 9. The idea materialized when the gallery’s director, Stephen Nowlin, asked Pasadena-based artist Steve Roden to make a sculpture that would address the different ways that science and art look at the earth and the environment.

“I had a vague idea about sound generated by science data,” says Nowlin. “Steve was interested and took off from there, with the notion of making this strange sculptural piece that houses sound-making devices.”
Nowlin, who has collaborated before with Caltech investigators on art exhibitions found a willing partner in Mark Simons, associate professor of geophysics, who uses satellite imagery to analyze the earth’s ground movements. “I gave them some observational data that we made on how the earth deformed during the magnitude 7.1 1999 Hector Mine earthquake,” says Simons, adding that he had no problem seeing his scientific results used to launch an artistic enterprise. “There is a lot of room for art as a way to illustrate and get people to appreciate science,” he says.

Without knowing exactly how his data would be used, Simons turned it over to AnnMarie Polsenberg, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, whose research focuses on underwater robotics. Since coming to Caltech in 2001 from MIT, where she minored in music, Polsenberg has taken design classes at Art Center, and in the fall she started teaching a class there on natural systems and how to apply knowledge of them to man-made structures.

With the earthquake data in hand, Polsenberg and Roden, the artist, devised the mechanical design and other aspects of the sculpture. Polsenberg wrote the computer code that translated Simons’s data—a numerical sequence—into musical notes and then configured a microprocessor to operate motors that move wooden arms with fishing swivels attached to large metal washers that strike the glockenspiel bars. “There are 80 different notes that can be played,” she says. “We’re hoping that walking through the sculpture will be a magical experience.”

Roden designed the wood sculptural structure, which resembles an airplane fuselage but which he says was actually patterned after a lamp by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Although the glockenspiels play no noticeable musical pattern, and the gentle tinkling of their bars may not immediately conjure images of an earthquake, Roden says that it was never his aim to simulate the sounds that the earth might make during a temblor.

“Mark’s data, when plotted on a graph, is visually beautiful,” Roden says. “My interest was in using the data to create something like a player piano score. The core is still his research data on movements of the earth. But I’m more interested in creating a listening experience.

“When people walk through the sculpture, it will hopefully sound like rain on a metal awning. When they walk out, it should make them think about all the sounds around them that they never pay attention to.”

As for Simons, who viewed the work at the opening reception, he says, “It’s always interesting to see how people interpret your stuff. My 18-month-old daughter loved running through it and hearing the echoes.”

FINDING ART IN THE STARS

Back on campus, the landscape has been altered by two dramatically different sculptural installations created for the Tender Land festival by Los Angeles artists Lita Albuquerque and Michael McMillen. Both installations, selected by the Institute Art Committee and also curated by Nowlin, will remain in place until April 2005.

For Albuquerque, the festival offered an opportunity for a kind of homecoming. In 1973, her first exhibition as a professional artist was at Caltech’s Baxter Art Gallery (which closed in 1985). Her current exhibit, called Stellar Mapping I, was partly inspired by astrophysics research carried out at Caltech.

Lita Albuquerque takes a break while installing Stellar Mapping I, her sculpture on the Caltech campus.

Albuquerque is known internationally for making ephemeral outdoor artworks, including a 1996 project in the Egyptian desert in which she created a celestial map of the northern hemisphere out of blue pigment. Her Institute project draws on the work of the late Caltech physicist William Fowler, PhD ’36, whose Nobel Prize–winning research showed that all the chemical elements, other than hydrogen and helium (and a bit of lithium), were generated by thermonuclear fusion inside stars. In her art installation located near Avery House, on the north side of campus, Albuquerque arranged 32 bell jars on a black concrete platform surrounded by a ring of glass chips, and placed red softball-sized spheres, crushed glass, chunks of dry blue pigment, and gold leaf under the jars. The jars are arranged in a pattern that roughly reflects the orientation of stars in the constellation Lupus, where a supernova occurred in the year 1006 to the amazement of observers in both Europe and Asia, who chronicled its appearance in the records of the day. Today, astronomers know that the heavy elements flung from exploding stars are crucial to the formation of new stars and planets.

“Stellar Mapping I is both a mapping in the sky of a historical supernova, and the sculptural interpretation of a fantasy lab researching supernovas,” notes Albuquerque in a display text adjacent to the exhibit. The items in the bell jars are meant to symbolize “interstellar remnants found from the grand explosion of 1006.”

Albuquerque, who has been on the graduate faculty at Art Center since 1987, says that her work increasingly concerns science, in particular physics. “Over the past 20 years, I’ve chased solar eclipses in Guatemala and visited observatories around the world, from South America to Hawaii to New Zealand. The Caltech project is about location, mapping, and identity.”

THE ARTFUL DR. CRUMP

The Caltech art installation by Michael McMillen also marks a return to the Institute. When he was a young sculptor in the 1970s, he helped create the artificial boulders in and around what is now Throop Site. (Most of these “pseudoliths” were subsequently replaced with authentic rocks from the San Gabriel mountains.) McMillen’s Caltech project, Dr. Crump’s Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (Field Unit 1), is located just a stone’s throw from the Throop Site ponds between the Thomas and Guggenheim laboratories.

Artist Michael McMillen (right) takes a break from his labors in Dr. Crump's Inductive Geo-Imaging Mobile Laboratory (left), the art installation that resembles a strange mini-trailer, which he created on the Caltech campus as part of Pasadena's Tender Land festival.

As one can tell from the title of McMillen’s work, the artist makes room for humor in his art. For a 1981 work, The Central Meridian, which remains on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, McMillen created what he described as a “walk-in assemblage,” which has the cluttered look and musty smell of an old garage, taking visitors on a time journey far from the world of high art.

Dr. Crump’s laboratory leads visitors on a different trip, albeit just as offbeat. The lab also doubles as a trailer, containing a lab bench, cabinets stuffed with quasi-scientific paraphernalia, diagrams, and photographs, and a television screen that runs a black and white film of an excavation. In a whimsical note accompanying the installation, McMillen writes, “An ancient rumor from Caltech’s fascinating past has come to light with the announcement this past September of a remarkable discovery on the campus. Employing the unique services of an urban archeologist and one-time Caltech student, Dr. C. R. Crump, scientists were able to confirm the existence of a series of buried chambers from the early part of the twentieth century. The object in question is believed to be a subterranean laboratory, sealed and virtually forgotten for over 70 years. Using his proprietary technology and archival data, Dr. Crump was able to locate the position of the rumored facility and conduct preliminary explorations of the sealed interiors with remote sensors.”

Dr. Crump’s technology, says McMillen, is a kind of underground radar that can image what lies beneath the earth’s surface. Over the next several months, visitors to the trailer will encounter an ever-evolving archive of artifacts from the good doctor’s research. McMillen, who calls his artwork an homage to the “industrial, Art Deco look” of the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers flicks he loved as a kid, says that he hopes that Dr. Crump’s lab will take viewers out of the present to a different time and place.

Caltech students will have the opportunity to fraternize with Crump’s creator over the next several months, since McMillen will serve as the Institute’s artist in residence for the academic year. “I will be available to students if they have an art project that they want to pursue or an idea that they want to express visually or if they just want to talk,” says McMillen, who adds that he originally planned to major in chemistry in college before deciding that he liked making art more. “I also hope to make work here that will have some significance.

“I’m excited to be here,” says McMillen, whose campus digs are in the subbasement of the Moore Laboratory. “Caltech students are exceptional, and I like the challenge of working with students who are not trained in the visual arts but certainly have active minds. I’m sure they’ll teach me a lot.”

More information on the Tender Land festival can be found on the Web at www.tenderland.org.