Date: 2011

Location:
Arizona Science Center, Phoenix, AZ

Commissioning Agency:
Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture

Project Manager:
Raphael Ngotie

Details:
Three interactive sculptures, Aluminum, stainless steel, video monitors, video camera, computer and software.

Ceiling Telescope:
25 ft x 6 ft x 6 ft.
Ceiling Microscope:
18 ft x 10 ft x 10 ft.
Floor Telescope:
5 ft x 4 ft x 4 ft.

Technical Collaborator:
David Tinapple

Fabrication:
Magnum Industries

Photographs:
Bill King

A new lobby for the Arizona Science Center gave me the opportunity to make something big and silly and striking and strange. Because it’s maintained by the AZSC staff, we could use computers and sensors and monitors, and know that it would keep working. The vision behind the telescopes and microscopes a loop of changing perspectives: A giant looking down through the telescopes in the ceiling at us tiny people, we looking back into the sky, animals peering at us through the floor telescope eyepiece. We are big and small, we are us and them.

The artwork’s title is borrowed from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, inviting us to imagine ourselves growing huge and then tiny, exploring the strange and wonderful world around us:

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!”