For my first Musings contribution, I want to talk about one of my favourite subjects: orbs--Where to find them, what they do, how to appreciate them. I want to introduce the sorts of technological orbs that you can find in museums!
Science on a Sphere
The most educational of orbs: Science on a Sphere (SOS). Created by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), SOS is a system of computers running special software and projectors that work to display and control data on a six-foot diameter sphere.
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| Science on a Sphere at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum in Michigan. Notice the kiosk! Source. |
The greatest strength of SOS is that it comes with a host of resources, but is customizable to the museum and to the user. You can create a narrative from scratch or use one of the provided lesson plans. The sphere can display animations, layer datasets, and it is interactive. It can even display real-time data. The data catalog is growing, and includes work from NOAA, NASA, universities, and science centres.
Want to learn about the Aurora Borealis? Cities through time? Great White Sharks? The possibilities are nearly limitless.
Currently, the only places to see Science on a Sphere in Canada are the Museum of Natural History in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the TELUS World of Science in Edmonton, Alberta. The United States, China, and India lead the world in the number of science spheres. I think SOS would be a magnificent addition to our local Ontario Science Centre (OSC). Speaking of OSC . . .
Life of the Earth, Death of the Sun
When I heard about this exhibition at the Ontario Science Centre, I thought it would be similar to SOS. I was wrong! It was much, much, bigger and stunningly beautiful. This orb is an art installation (in fact, it debuted at Nuit Blanche), a moving experience, and a political commentary. This work is meant to unify viewers over this simple fact that the Earth and the Sun are the only orbs we cannot live without. This puts things in perspective: each minute you spend viewing the orb during Death of the Sun represents one billion years.
During the Life of the Earth phase of the experience, you can watch our planet change over the course of 335 million years. Meanwhile a dizzying sequence of images flashes on the wall, beginning with images of nonhuman life, and then moving into art and culture through the ages. At some point, there is a shift – and we are in the future. The Earth browns, the lights wink out, and the waters rise. The images on the wall are no longer of art and culture; they are war, unrest, dire news headlines, graphs of global temperatures going up and up and up. This vision of the future is a call to action to mitigate climate change and take responsibility for the Anthropocene. I found this experience to be a unique and moving contribution to the growing body of orbs in museum collections.
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| The author in front of Death of the Sun, planetary nebula phase. Photo Courtesy of Val Master. |
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