Dynamo Exhibit at the Grand Palais

What made the exhibition at the Grand Palais special was the fact that many of the inventions displayed there were things that relied on geometry, electricity, optics, or perspective – all topics that relate to my studies and interests. As with many other museums, I spent much of my visit attempting to discern how the pieces were constructed, or how the artist had achieved a particular effect. More so here than with other museums, at the Grand Palais my skill set and education worked to my benefit in seeing the underlying geometry that supported many of the pieces. At the museum, I found inspiration for the passions that drive me to work with student groups, a piece that I puzzled over and found a solution for, and one that gave me a new appreciation for my perspective.

In the College of Science and Engineering at UMN, I am an officer of two student groups in particular that work to mix science with outside disciplines, among them art. For example, members have built a flashy winter light show timed to music and are building animatronic, singing busts of President Kaler in Tesla Works, and the emerging CSE Carnival seeks to showcase science to middle school students using all the flash and dazzle at our disposal. The exhibits at this museum in particular got me thinking of ideas for future projects in Tesla Works, a group oriented toward the purpose of bringing ideas to reality. One such idea would be to use the notion of prime numbers in the construction of some machine or program, with multiple patterns cycling with relatively prime frequencies oriented around a common clock. Using only the prime numbers up to 20, if the pattern changed once per second, the same pattern would not recur for over three months! Whether musical, mechanical, or visual, this is a pattern that might be very fun to build. To those of you reading this blog, remind me of this goal - I want to make this happen!

One exhibit that especially made me stop and think involved two fans and a length of film. The fans faced each other approximately two meters from a wall, and on that wall a loop of film three meters across wavered, floating in the air. In Dadaist art, the artist takes ordinary objects and they become art because he says so; in this display, the fans and film could be purchased in a store, but their placement created a trompe l’oeil and made the viewer wonder what he was seeing. I appreciated knowing that the artists who built this exhibit are responsible for the design of the work more than for its execution, because that means that their art is reproducible from design – this means I can test my guess as to how the film was suspended. I may need to work with the properties of film in practice, but my current guess from this exhibit is that the fans were spinning in the same direction, creating an upward current of air at the wall that supported the thin film. My speculation is just a hypothesis, but the point is that unlike with the Mona Lisa or Penseur, I have the means to build the piece and see if I can replicate the experience. That was my favorite feature of this exhibit – while in the Louvre, every piece is unique, in the Dynamo exhibit, there was a sense that the observer could partake in the creative experience given the right tools.

Video of the fans and film

One stark exception to this rule was the room filled with blue light and opaque, odorless fog, titled Daylight blue, sky blue, medium blue, yellow, by Ann Veronica Janssens. In this space, people and walls became visible just before they came within arm’s reach, and walking with a hand outstretched to avoid walls and people was a necessity. As I try to recall the strange sensation of being in that space and the habits I developed just to keep my orientation amid the blindness, I am led to remember the sensation I had upon leaving the room and adjusting to being able to see as far as ten or twenty feet! This afternoon, flying 24000 feet above Minnesota I remembered how much I take my vision for granted, and how different my life would be without it.

My hand inside the fog.