‘Tornado Man’ Taking San Francisco by Storm

It’s not always easy for Ned Kahn 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 sand-like 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.”

Or 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.” The show runs through Jan. 5 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 and a fan that creates an updraft.

“More often it’s just experimenting and playing with materials,” said Kahn, whose San Francisco 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, 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 can still 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 and other cities. His work also appears in Canada and Japan.

He obtains most of his work through word of mouth and “sending videotapes out into the darkness,” said Kahn, whose interests have included botany 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, air funnels and natural collisions.

“The aerospace industry has probably spent billions of dollars trying to get rid of the things I make,” he said, laughing.