Art Center College of Design

Art Center College of Design a world leader among higher institutions for creative studies. The Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery hosts free public exhibitions of emerging and internationally recognized artists and designers, with an emphasis on the intersection of art, science and technology. The college opened its South Campus in downtown Pasadena as a location for public programs in early 2004.

The Relationship Between Art and Science
At Art Center’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, artist Steve Roden, in collaboration with Caltech geophysicist Mark Simons and robotics graduate student Ann Marie Polsenberg, explores the fertile territory between these two ancient and intertwined disciplines in his sculptural installation ear(th). At Art Center’s South Campus, the gardenLAb experiment invades the Wind Tunnel Exhibition Hall to conduct tests on our current relationship to natural forces, experimenting with models of an ecology in flux.

Earth Surfaces
Music, to which Aaron Copland’s 1954 composition and opera The Tender Land attests, can evoke images of the earth and how humans relate to the environment as a complex subject that is beautiful and at the same time disquieting. At the Williamson Gallery, Roden’s ear(th) sound/sculpture captures data produced by instruments measuring geodynamic forces on and below the earth’s surface and funnels them into acoustic sound-making devices—music produced by the beauty of how science understands the earth.

At the Wind Tunnel, gardenLAb seeks to help us better understand the vital interdependent relationships we have with complex natural cycles. Part simulated garden, part miniature city, this recreated environment represents the natural cycle of a biotope.

A Link to Our Partners
To gain more perspective on how music and the earth can relate, visit performances at the Pasadena Symphony, Shumei Arts and Southwest Chamber Music. For other examples of how art and science can combine, visit the art installations by Lita Albuquerque and Michael McMillen at Caltech.