Ongoing: Blue Dreams and Poets for Science at the National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is hosting an immersive video installation billed as “inspired by the intricate workings of microbial networks in the deep sea and beyond.” These gallant microbes may be crucial to earth and life, but—like “Sea Ice Daily Drawings,” another gorgeously styled recent exhibit in the Academy’s curvilinear Upstairs Gallery—the scientific explanation leaves a lot to the imagination. Blue Dreams, the current exhibit, is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving Rika Anderson, Samantha (Mandy) Joye, Rebecca Rutstein, Shayn Peirce-Cottler, and Tom Skalak; it offers a looped video projected from floor to ceiling against the gallery’s semicircular wall. Visually, the work offers surreal shapes in shades of deep purple, red, and hot pink, washing over each other. They range from calming water waves to phantasmagoric flame-like forms to jiggly, sperm-shaped objects. But to the viewer, all the real-world good ascribed to them remains sadly unelaborated. —Louis Jacobson