In the entryway to the newest exhibit at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry the word "Imaging" is spelled out in big letters above an arched doorway, as a fast-motion loop of digitized images - clouds, colors, earth, internal organs - spills across and behind it. The word is obscured by the images - and that sums up the intent of the entire installation.
"We didn't want this to be your typical museum exhibit, with lots of explanatory text and narrative," says Jeet Singh, president of Arts Technology Group, one of the developers of the US$4 million permanent exhibition on imaging science. "We hardly use any text. The point is that the images themselves are a form of information - distilled and visual."
"Imaging: Tools of Science" celebrates the illustrative power of these images with a series of computer-controlled stations, each designed to educate visitors about particular scientific or artistic applications - and, not incidentally, designed to be really cool. The entire exhibit hall is awash in color and light and flashing videos, a sort of cartoony, post- industrial super-arcade, with all cabling visible and with the driving computers grouped behind Plexiglas in a room at the back.
As for the individual stations themselves, they're agglomerations of the practical, such as "Be a Brain Surgeon," and the non-applied but nifty, such as the "Thermographic Portal" (which throws a full-size, gaudy, infrared image of each visitor onto a big screen). "We wanted to show how computer imaging can make the invisible - things like heat, noise, the internal body - visible," says Barry Aprison, the museum's senior scientist.
But the real heart of the exhibit is the many morphing workstations. To play on these, you lean into a scanner so a computer-generated photographic image is acquired by the system. Then the fun begins. The computer mutates you, remixes you, de-pixelates you, the altered image moving from station to station, so others can watch you change.
Of course, the culmination of any imaging exhibit can only lie in one technology: virtual reality, and here the exhibit really shines. "This is absolutely state of the art," Singh says. The VR display begins with a representation of the VR room itself, then zooms the user down a cord, through a circuit board, and out into a cityscape (complete with the faces of other visitors captured by the system), and eventually back. Like the rest of the exhibit, it's wild, it's funny, it's edifying, and all in all, it's quite a trip. Virtually. Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry: +1 (312) 684 1414.
- Gretchen Reynolds
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Imaging at the Museum
