Ken Goldberg, with Kabir Shah, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, presents a site-specific installation that turns live seismic data into circular blooms of color drawn from five landscape paintings in the museum's collection.
The data comes from the NN.JVTV.HNZ seismometer station on the University of Nevada, Reno campus, delivered as a live feed by the Desert Research Institute. Bands of color in each bloom never repeat. The installation samples one painting per minute, so all five appear every five minutes: works by Chester Arnold, Sandow Birk, Maynard Dixon, Jean LaMarr and Phyllis Shafer, which hang just outside the gallery.
"As an artist and roboticist, I use new technologies to express the contrasts between what is natural and what is artificial, the liminal spaces between reality and representation," says Ken Goldberg.
ReBloom: Reno continues his series of site-specific seismic installations. Ken Goldberg is Professor of Engineering and Art Practice at UC Berkeley, and his work is also included in Artport: A History of Internet Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 21 November 2026. He gives an artist talk at the museum on 16 October, 12 to 1 pm.
