Foucault’s Dream

This work is inspired by the motion described in the play of orbits and spheres. One finds such movement in everything from subatomic particles to the orbits of comets and planets. We sought to make visible this curvilinear motion as it repeats throughout the artwork (and our lives) and echoes this same movement in the precession of the pendulum mechanism itself.

The pendulum design engages in a series of references to celestial and mechanical ideas about time. The kinetic movement of the installation reminds each one of us that our viewpoint is not fixed, that we are bodies in motion like the earth orbiting around the sun.

The 110-pound sculpted and cast bronze bob is inscribed with axial and rotational lines. The pendulum swings above a tempered glass disk which furthers the time-based metaphors with the etched form of infinite fractal shapes overlaying the Fibonacci sequence seen through the glass in the epoxy floor. At the base, a three-tiered terrazzo floor in seventeen colors forms a field of orbital and celestial imagery. Forty-five LED lights are embedded in the tiers, programmed to respond to the pendulum’s motion, turning on and off as the bob swings, so that the floor twinkles like a reflection of stars in moving water. The floor echoes the sky at night and the sky describes the motion of the earth in the floor below.

The installation rises three full stories through the entrance stairwell. At the top, a sphere of interlocking hoops in gold, blue, green, and violet turns the origin point of the pendulum into something you can see from the street. Below it, iridescent rings descend along the pendulum’s vertical axis, marking the full swing of the pendulum. This image came to me from Bruce Cockburn’s song “Hoop Dancer.” Cockburn sees the hoop dancer as something like a living magnetic needle, aligned between deep past and looming future. At the end of the dance, the hoops combine into the form of a globe and the earth itself, which a pendulum demarcates.

Science and art share a connective thread in the ways they point to the interconnectedness of all things, a thread that binds the mystery of life to the deep questions of one’s age and one’s discipline. For many years I have been inspired by the last line in the movie Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman which goes like this, “On the tenuous ground of reality, imagination spins out and weaves new patterns.”