Observation of Beautiful Forms installation photos
Observations of Beautiful Form was an audio and visual collaborative installation by Megan Czekaj and Mark Geist that was a site specific and commissioned by New Haven's Art Space for the City Wide Open Studios at the Goffe Street Armory in 2014.
At the time the concepts of supersymmetry and multiverse were in science news, with an organized data science challenge; the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge. As artists who are interested in scientific concepts we used what we were learning and trying to understand about the two concepts to try to image what each concept might look like. We used the simple and well used technology of mirrors to help us illustrate our abstract ideas of these two complicated concepts being shared in main stream media, by projecting video observations we record in and of local nature.
The result was an interactive installation of two life-sized kaleidoscopes built into the perimeter of the space. One with an opening to look through to the video being bent and reflected, the other projecting out multiple shapes and scenes reflected through the mirrored structure, cast into the darkened open space. Kaleidoscope means "observer of beautiful things" or "an instrument for seeing beautiful shapes", from the Greek words kalos (beautiful), eidos (shape), and scope (an instrument for seeing), there we found the title of this work: Observation of Beautiful Forms.