The Brooklyn Rail

Southern California’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide—a five-month–long exhibition (the largest art event in the United States)—has been releasing a sprawl of dazzling energies from the much-needed collision. Since its opening in September, the spark between the two fields has ignited the wonder of the world, enhanced or challenged by old and new technologies and science. Ranging from ancient astronomical instruments to the latest artificial intelligence, visitors are invited to observe the long history of art and science entanglement and immerse into the kaleidoscopic world of light, color, sound, and smell.

At the Getty Center, Charles Ross’s Spectrum 14 welcomes visitors to interact with bands of spectral light, which are in tune with Earth’s rotational orbit. Commissioned for the rotunda, the splendid prisms of light activate the architecture and bodies of the visitors. The work traces the circadian rhythm of the planet and visitors. Lumen: The Art and Science of Light takes this awe to the Middle Ages, with special installations by Helen Pashgian and Ross, exploring the curiosity of light by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers, theologians, and artists. The desire for spectacles flourished in the twentieth century in the minds of the landmark artist-engineer collaborations of E.A.T., featured in the adjacent exhibition Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Highlighting their two iconic multimedia projects, 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (1966) and the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan, the show sets this collaborative work as the capstone of trailblazing art-science collaboration in postwar history.

Continuing the trajectory, Caltech’s Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 surveys one hundred years of notable crossovers at the scientific institution, featuring works from their remarkable collection, including rare first-edition books in physics and astronomy, as well as scientific drawings, posters, and data visualizations across disciplines, along with commissioned contemporary artworks at the campus. At the Brand Library at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a federally funded research center Caltech operates for NASA, Shane Myrbeck and Saskia Wilson-Brown’s Sensory Mementos and Interstellar Soundings, part of the exhibition Blended Worlds: Experiments In Interplanetary Imagination, draws visitors into an extraordinary environment where they can smell Earth’s lost scents and sounds from exoplanets. Co-created with JPL experts, a number of works in the show evoke bodily sensations through music scores inspired by seismic or planetary activities, and interactive LED poles activated by touch.

At the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Olafur Eliasson: OPEN is a site-specific extravaganza of light and color that lures visitors to the phantasmagoria of reflection, refraction, and reverberation. Eliasson’s open field unfolds the expanded marvel of nature. Sharing the inquiry into the cosmos, LACMA’s ambitious cross-cultural survey of cosmologies, Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures, provides a place for comparative analysis from social, political, and religious contexts, charting from the prehistoric period to the present. Expanding the scope of Getty’s Lumen, the exhibition highlights distinctive astrological motifs and knowledge across cultures, ranging from Ancient Egyptian, Islamic, and Buddhist cosmologies to Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. The museum’s other large-scale exhibition, We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art, explores the use and symbolism of color in Mesoamerican art. With an emphasis on the materiality and source of colors, the exhibition examines the Indigenous philosophy reflected in figurines, ceramics, murals, and textiles. Fast forward to the modern era, Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema at the nearby Academy Museum of Motion Pictures chronicles the history of film colors, from the earliest hand-painted silent films to today’s digital colorization, spotlighting the psychological impact and significance of color in entertainment.

In conjunction with the exhibitions, PST ART has boasted a remarkable list of public events and new openings, including commissions, exhibitions, or restagings of original works, all sprung from local collaborations. The opening of Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature at the Broad bolsters the environmental activism of Hammer Museum’s Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice. The highlight of the show is a concurrent major reforestation initiative, Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, inspired by Beuys’s 7,000 Eichen (7,000 Oaks) of 1982, in which he called for planting seven thousand trees accompanied by stone markers throughout the city of Kassel in Germany for Documenta 7. In partnership with Tongva (Gabrielino) archaeologists, the project was initiated to plant one hundred native oak trees in nearby Elysian Park and five trees at the sacred Kuruvungna Village Springs in West LA.

Other outdoor community projects call attention to interspecies collaboration. As part of the exhibition Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics, a nonprofit venue LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) restaged artist Beatriz da Costa’s (1974–2012) seminal work, PigeonBlog (2006–08), in which she attached DIY sensors to homing pigeons to track air pollution data in real-time. Revisiting the collaborative project between da Costa, engineers, and pigeon fanciers after nearly twenty years, the grassroots data collection was live on the PigeonBlog interactive map during the restaging on November 16. At the same venue, the event was immediately followed by the LA Dance Project’s premiere of Resonance, an innovative dance on empathy born out of dialogue between choreographers, a social neuroscientist, and a historian. Against the natural backdrop, the dancers’ movements varied in rhythms, styles, and expressions, often challenging their body anatomy and gravity. At times, the dancers vibrated by themselves like particles or pushed or pulled each other like magnets. The dance was unpredictable and abstract.

The weekend’s highlight was LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings, a twelve-hour festival of live performances and sonic installations held at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Under the theme of field recordings, wide-ranging music took inspiration from nature and built environments outside studios, composing sounds of water, clouds, waves, and outer space. Amongst the program was the debut of Doug Aitken’s Lightscape—an immersive multimedia installation co-produced in partnership with Los Angeles Master Chorale and the LA Phil. In Aitken’s work, the boundaries between film, chorale, and orchestra become nebulous. Sounds come from the film at times, then fluidly transferred or switched to the vocals of the Chorale “in the blink of an eye”—as the repeating line says. The hypnotic montage features a torrent of scenes that simultaneously connect and collide. Aitken’s polyphonic Lightscape resonates with the fantasy of pluriverse and quantum existence in which all beings are in flux. The idea ran through A Day of Quantum Listening held at the Ebell of Los Angeles the next day, curated by musician Claire Chase. In celebration of the legendary composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros, the program engaged the audience in “deep listening,” which Oliveros designed to heighten awareness of the sonic environment. Through communal listening, tuning, and music-making, the audience tapped into the dormant realm of an interconnected world.

Across more than seventy institutions, visitors encounter plants, mushrooms, bees, rocks, water, etc., taking over PST ART galleries as protagonists, collaborators, inspirations, or memento mori. Lives beyond humanity are very present throughout the shows. Their presence in the exhibitions reminds us that we share our breath with them. That we all are particles and waves. We radiate in varying lumens. Our radiating energies collide with others, creating resonance.