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Planetary Landscapes: Sculpting the Solar System by Ned Kahn at Chabot Space & Science Center

Imagine passing your hand through a cauldron of billowing, moist fog, or creating a network of streams in fine powder. Visitors experience these and other phenomena in Planetary Landscapes: Sculpting the Solar System, an exhibition of fourteen interactive sculptures by internationally renowned artist Ned Kahn. Now on display at Chabot Space & Science Center, the sculptures are designed to explore, in constantly varying patterns, the dynamic forces that shape our Solar System.

The effects of natural phenomena such as turbulence, flow, wind, and the drive toward equilibrium are displayed in the works. In Static Landscape, for example, thousands of tiny steel balls cascade across the surface of a large shallow disk, generating electrical charges. Visitors alter the patterns by tilting the disk and running their hands over its surface. Static forces organize the balls into dazzling waves and other intricate patterns that resemble the lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere, or the solar winds that charge the soil of the Moon and other bodies not protected by a magnetic field.

In Dust Devil, a vortex encased in a clear cylinder sweeps up fine particles of sand to form a twirling dust devil. Visitors activate the vortex and watch its shifts and moves. Particles drift in and out of the vortex, as in the dust devils of the Martian atmosphere. The sculpture offers an opportunity to observe relative scale and time in the life of a vortex: while a dust devil may last ten minutes, a tornado an hour, and a hurricane a week, Jupiter's great Red Spot has swirled for over 300 years.

Accompanying the sculptures are photographs taken during space flights and on Earth, revealing the same patterns as those created in the sculptures.

Planetary Landscapes: Sculpting the Solar System is a unique blend of art and science that was developed by the Chabot Space & Science Center with support from the National Science Foundation. This permanent exhibition is on display at Chabot Space & Science Center beginning August 19, 2000.

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