Artist Opens ‘Windows to Other Worlds’ for the Rest of Us

Physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say that artists and scientists are the official “noticers” of society: people whose business it is to notice things that other people never learned to see or have learned to ignore.

I’ve never known anyone with quite the knack for noticing as San Francisco artist Bob Miller. Since I’ve known him, countless things I used to think quite ordinary have been animated by his imagination. Once he asked me: How would you suspend 500,000 pounds of water in the air with no visible means of support?

Answer: Build a cloud.

Needless to say, clouds have never looked quite the same to me since.

Neither has dawn. Before I met Bob, I never thought about the continual wave of people rising from their beds that sweeps around the globe as the shadow of night lifts time zone by time zone, much like the wave that runs through a crowd at a ballgame, except that the tide of waking people is a wave that never ends.

I think of this wave as a kinetic sculpture that Bob placed permanently inside my head.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office didn’t get this concept at all. One of Bob’s sculptures is an optical illusion in which a concave object appears to pop out and follow you as you walk by. The sculpture is made up of an inside corner of a box that appears to turn into a cube, and so he calls it his “Far Out Corner.”

Oppenheimer encouraged him to patent this optical illusion/sculpture many years ago. They were both amused when the request was turned down. The reason? The bureaucrats maintained that he couldn’t patent an effect that existed only in someone’s mind. As if there’s a piece of art or science that doesn’t. The patent office later relented.

Bob’s signature piece is probably his “Sun Painting,” which begins with a beam of plain white light from the sun, refracted through a rack of prisms, then sliced with thin mirrors into a palette of pure colors--Bob’s “paints.”

The late poet Muriel Rukeyser was inspired by this work to write a poem for Bob, describing the work as “a lashing of color.”

“Not color, strands of light. Not light but pure deep color beyond color.”

You have invited us all. Allow the sunlight, dance your dance.

Before I met Bob, I labored, like most people, under the misconception that the green of the grass, the red of the car outside my window, the yellow of the neighbor’s cat, came from the objects themselves. But no, they come from the sun: The purple of that Laker flag is a gift from a star 93 million miles away.

In my mind’s eye, Bob “painted” white light in brilliant colors as surely as Lewis Carroll’s playing cards painted the Queen’s white roses red.

He’s done the same thing with shadows, which I used to see as black and white. Now I see a shadow as a “negative” image that contains as much information as a “positive” image. Bob makes a spellbinding case for this in a piece of performance art called “Bob Miller’s Light Walk.”

Here’s a taste. A pinhole camera (in essence, a box with a pinhole poked in one end) can make an image of any scene, moving or static. But suppose instead of a hole, you use its complement: not the hole in the doughnut, but the doughnut “hole” you eat; not a pinhole, but a pin “speck.” The shadow cast by the speck is a complementary image.

Astonishingly, if you dangle a pin speck, you don’t just block light, you can create a perfect negative image of a scene.

During a solar eclipse viewing in the Black Sea, after Bob wowed astronomers with his light tricks, he did the same for artists that night sitting in a bar. Using a small piece of cheese suspended on a hair as a pin speck, he cast colored shadows of some brightly colored lights. The shadow image appeared not only upside down and reversed, as you might expect, but also in complementary colors: The red turned to turquoise, the blue to yellow.

Creating a pin speck image can be tricky, especially in a bar. It requires just the right lighting and geometry to make its magic work. But everyone can see it during even a partial solar eclipse.

Even the tips of your fingernails can serve as pin specks that cast a clear complementary image of the sun--dark crescents decorating your hands like claws. (All of Bob’s works can be seen at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. You can also see them on the Web at www.exploratorium.edu.)

To Bob, there’s no such thing as uninteresting, diffuse white light. It’s awash with images, bursting with brilliant colors; they need only to be separated out, like voices in a crowd. Whether we do it with holes or specks doesn’t matter. (Making lifelike portraits out of holes and specks is one of Bob’s specialties.)

Bob often says that the worst disease afflicting humankind is “hardening of the categories”: our futile attempts to cram things into boxes and keep them there. Boxes like “art” and “science,” for example.

These categories become blinders that prevent us from noticing: the weight of clouds, the colors of white, the light in shadows, the opportunities in obstacles.

Bob’s “artist’s statement” sums it up: “Blobs, spots, specks, smudges, cracks, defects, mistakes, accidents, exceptions and irregularities are the windows to other worlds.”