A Room With Multiple Views

San Francisco’s award-winning Exploratorium, which has been knocking every speck of dust from the word “museum” since 1969, continues its cheeky through-the-looking-glass approach to the riddles of human perception.

Its latest eye-popper, “Seeing,” debuts June 29 and runs through January, and although some of its 70 exhibits last only a month, a week or a day, there’s still enough on display to cause an exhilarating sensory overload.

Tickle your rods and cones for two weekends with the “Seeing Film Series,” which showcases 10 short films on the nature of color. Feel super-smart with “Light and the Eye,” a 15-exhibit collection that delivers the anatomical precision of an optometry course, minus the boredom. (Whatever you may do with your eyes at the Exploratorium, closing them is not a viable option.)

Experience a not-so-old-fashioned Rorschach test with Paul Kaiser’s “Inkblot Perceptions,” if you don’t mind a little psychological probing. In July, check out the wizardly Sara Crasson, whose illuminating magic show relies as much on science as sleight-of-hand.

And if you just want to look on in sheer awe, don’t miss “Evidence” by Judith Scott, a 59-year-old sculptor with Down Syndrome whose inability to hear or speak is more than matched by her visual imagination.

If you’ve been trying to justify your sudden impulse to head north and “I wanted to make sure the Golden Gate Bridge was still there” just won’t cut it, look no further. Figuratively speaking.

*

Seeing” at the San Francisco Exploratorium, 3601 Lyon St., San Francisco, (415) 563-7337. www.exploratorium.edu. Summer hours: 10 a.m.--6 p.m. daily; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Wednesdays. Admission is $10 for adults, $7.50 for students and seniors, $6 for people with disabilities and ages 5-17, and free for children 4 and younger.