Art in the Photonics Center

Athanor forms a continually changing splash of color on the wall of the Photonics Center’s atrium. A heliostat on the roof, a mirror that tracks the sun, sends sunlight down to warped dichroic glass plates, which reflect light only within certain ranges of color.

The original 1997 installation benefited from considerable mechanical engineering support by BU astronomy professor Ken Janes. We recently refurbished the sculpture’s mechanisms and controller with a closed-loop control system that keeps it aligned throughout the year. The Photonics Center staff will vouch for my dedication to its preservation, noting the many hours I have spent on the roof refining the new controller.

Watch a time-lapse

This is a work I created, modeled after the hexagonal deformable mirror made by Boston Micromachines Corporation, the company I co-founded. It also draws on my Introduction to Engineering Design class, where teams of students use Arduinos and motors to develop new products, and on the art of Danny Rozin.

The sculpture has 37 hexagonal mirror segments, each driven by servo motors. A 64-pixel infrared camera watches the space in front of it. When the camera detects the warmth of a passing person, the segments tilt so that the person sees their own reflection, and they follow the person’s motion to keep them centered. Many people are startled by the noisy, sudden slewing of the mirrors (unmute the video to hear it).

Alice Orleman based this sculpture on a 14th-century illuminated manuscript that describes the creation of light and the spheres.

Once, while heading for the elevator, I came across a woman admiring the piece. Despite my tendency toward impertinent commentary, I offered this stranger a sincere appreciation. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked. “Oh, I think so too!” she said, smiling. “My daughter is the artist who made it.”

A jellyfish etched in clear acrylic and lit edge-on with ultraviolet light. It is a favorite of many for both its haunting beauty and its remarkable realism.

Jung Gao made this large-format photograph on film, with a nearly opaque neutral density filter over the lens, exposing continuously for 21 days in April 2007 from a perch in the West End Lounge. It records the daily sweeps of the sun, and its occasional absence behind unseen clouds, in a way that is both engaging and unsettling. The Massachusetts Turnpike, surely crowded day and night with spring traffic, appears eerily vacant.

Part of Bill Bell’s Lightstick series, this subliminary artwork uses widely spaced columns of LEDs that scan patterns at high speed. Our eyes reassemble them into pictures of great photonics scientists and the equations that describe light. Visitors can change what is displayed by speaking commands into a nearby microphone panel.

After more than two decades of flawless operation, the piece began to fail in 2022. I found a ladder and tried to debug the control computer on a high shelf in an AV closet, without success. So I called Bill, then in his 90s, and asked for help. He walked me through the hardware, software, and networking as if he had installed it the week before. Together we found the fault, a corrupt cable and Ethernet switch, and brought the artwork back to life. Thank you, Bill!

This wide-format painting hangs on the east wall of my office, echoing the view through my window. It depicts an iconic Boston University scene and captures a moment in our history before the arrival of the Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering and the newly prominent Data Sciences Building. Where are the Warren Towers, our three-headed tribute to 1960s architecture? Surely they were around when it was painted. I believe it’s called artistic license.

Winner of the 2004 Art Is Light Design Challenge, this optical illusion shows a colorful Möbius strip that appears to float in space. The real strip is hidden inside. A large parabolic mirror and a plate-glass beam splitter form a magnified virtual image of it, suspended in front of the installation.

A poster-sized photoprint made in a darkened room: a long-exposure photograph of Laura’s face, illuminated only by a laser pointer scanned by Adamo’s hand.