No, it’s not the latest Bond girl from the opening titles of the upcoming Quantum of Solace. Artist Lynn Aldrich wields a glue gun as she assembles Pilgrimage: (Through the Wormhole) via which visitors will travel between two spaces in the gallery.

The Arts Page

The beauty of deep-space astronomy and the inventiveness of contemporary art meet in OBSERVE, an exhibition being mounted at the Williamson Gallery at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design in collaboration with Caltech’s Spitzer Science Center.

The event, organized by gallery director Stephen Nowlin and infrared astronomer Michelle Thaller, manager of Spitzer’s education and public outreach program, features installations by five artists—two with Caltech/JPL connections—as well as a section on the Spitzer Space Telescope and a documentary film.

Lita Albuquerque’s video walls turn the astronomers’ gaze inward by mapping deep-space images onto a sphere representing Earth. Red lines of light, like string stretched between pushpins, connect sky and ground. As the sphere turns, the parallel lines from pairs of stars above the north and south poles carve out DNA’s double helix on its surface.

Lynn Aldrich, an Art Center alum, is contributing the walk-through wormhole seen at left—a physical passage through metaphorical dimensions.

Dan Goods, another Art Center alum now at the Jet Propulsion Lab, is offering a rumination on time and distance. “We think we see the stars as they are right at this moment,” he says. “But they’re really at vastly different distances, so their light left them at different times in the past. Some of them died long, long ago, and now only exist as starlight.” His exhibit features an enormous, Dali-esque wall clock whose hands move backward. As visitors walk through the 34-foot-deep room, however, they realize that the 12 spheres representing the hours are actually different sizes and different distances away. Speakers on the spheres will play back computer-processed, time-delayed recordings of visitors’ voices. “The older the data, the more distorted it will be,” says Goods. “They’ll be redshifted, if you will, like the stars are talking to you.”

We Are Stardust, by George Legrady, projects a map of the deep-space targets of Spitzer’s infrared cameras on one gallery wall, on which a beam of green light traces the sequence of Spitzer’s observations. On the opposite wall, an infrared camera mounted in the gallery ceiling simultaneously follows the same set of pointing instructions to project thermal images of the people moving through its field of view in the gallery space.

George Legrady considers the use of imaging technology in the exploration of outer and inner space, as seen below.

And Daniel Wheeler’s installation encourages visitors to explore beyond the visible by feeling for an object hidden inside a wooden cylinder. An infrared camera records their hands’ exploration. These images, sent over the Internet to a series of screens on which other cameras are trained, get progressively distorted as they propagate through the gallery.

“When you get artists and scientists working together, you get serendipitous things that none of them intended as each person picks up on what the other is saying,” says Thaller. “Every person brings their own set of filters into the conversation, and the result is you get these associations you wouldn’t have thought of, and you say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really cool.’ We talk about things like quantum foam and light years without giving it a second thought, and then the artists show us again in a new way just how wonderful the stuff we’re working on really is.”

This cultural exchange began in August 2007, says Nowlin, noting that science has brought us “a lot of spectacular concepts that torque our everyday perception of reality—black-hole physics, multiple universes, string theories, time distortions—that challenge our human-centered cultural traditions and beliefs.”

This is “an exhibition about the newly unknown,” he says. “Before science we knew everything, because we filled in the gaps with myths.”

Nowlin has previously collaborated with Caltech scientists on ear(th), a sound installation that translated displacement data from the Hector Mine earthquake into notes played on a robotic glockenspiel, and NEURO, a multi-venue exhibit that drew on the resources of Caltech’s Center for Neuromorphic Engineering to inspire the work of a half-dozen artists.

OBSERVE opens with a public reception from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. on Friday, October 10, as part of ArtNight Pasadena, and runs through January 9, 2009. —DS