ARTIST'S WORK HAS SPECIAL SPIN : WEATHER-BASED EXHIBIT TO OPEN IN BAY AREA.Byline: Martha Irvine Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. It's not always easy for Ned Kahn Ned Kahn is an environmental artist and sculptor, famous in particular for museum exhibits he has built for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. His works usually involves capturing an invisible aspect of nature and making it visible; examples include building facades that move in to explain what he does for a living. He's part artist, part scientist, part kid. And he uses things like water hoses, cloudy fluids and sandlike glass beads to create tornadoes and sandstorms. ``Oh,'' said a businesswoman who once sat next to him on an airplane. ``So you're kind of a fine arts plumber (programming, tool) Plumber - A system for obtaining information about memory leaks in Ada and C programs. http://home.earthlink.net/~owenomalley/plumber.html. .'' Others might call him a rebel with a hose. Whichever it is, visitors to San Francisco's Exploratorium museum can decide for themselves when they view ``Turbulent Landscapes: The Natural Forces That Shape Our World'' show. It will run until just after New Year's and includes 30 nature-oriented art pieces, 18 of which are Kahn's. But this is not your average art show. For one, it's funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. For another, it includes the works of artists who create things like smelly mold farms and call them art. Kahn's work includes everything from boxes filled with bubbling sand pits to spinning glass spheres filled with fluid. One sphere roughly mimics the way weather patterns collide and move around the globe. ``When you apply this to the atmosphere, you wonder how they're ever able to predict the weather,'' Kahn said. Perhaps because of the movie ``Twister,'' the most popular of Kahn's exhibits appears to be two simulations of tornadoes - including one that extends from the Exploratorium's floor nearly to its high ceiling. The components of a tornado, in this case, are a fog machine A fog machine (also called a smoke machine) is a device which emits a dense vapor that appears similar to fog or smoke. This artificial fog or smoke is known as theatrical smoke and fog within the entertainment industry. and a fan that creates an updraft up·draft n. An upward current of air. updraft An upward current of warm, moist air. With enough moisture, the current may visibly condense into a cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud. Compare downdraft. . ``More often it's just experimenting and playing with materials,'' said Kahn, whose San Francisco San Francisco (săn frănsĭs`kō), city (1990 pop. 723,959), coextensive with San Francisco co., W Calif., on the tip of a peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, which are connected by the strait known as the Golden home is filled with some of those experiments. Kahn, 36, began his science/art career in 1982 as an apprentice to the late Frank Oppenheimer Frank Friedman Oppenheimer (August 14, 1912 – February 3, 1985) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, was a target of McCarthyism, and was later the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He was the younger brother of Dr. J. , the renowned physicist who founded the museum. Earning $5 an hour, Kahn played with bubbles and oil to create wild slicks of moving color that still can be seen at the museum. Since then, he has become a respected artist, working with architects and engineers to create fountains and other public art projects in San Francisco, Seattle, New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of and other cities. His work also appears in Canada and Japan. He obtains most of his work through word of mouth and ``sending videotapes (of it) out into the darkness,'' said Kahn, whose interests have included botany botany, science devoted to the study of plants. Botany, microbiology, and zoology together compose the science of biology. Humanity's earliest concern with plants was with their practical uses, i.e., for fuel, clothing, shelter, and, particularly, food and drugs. and astronomy. In fact, he started out to be a scientist and spent a couple summers working in labs. ``It was really pretty boring what they did,'' he said. Instead, he was drawn to chaos - ``industrial mischief,'' as he calls it - like whirlpools and natural collisions. ``The aerospace industry has probably spent billions of dollars trying to get rid of the things I make,'' he said, laughing. CAPTION(S): Photo PHOTO Ned Kahn sits in front of one of two tornado simulato rs he created for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Associated Press |
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