Exploratorium After Dark
Event Schedule for Thursdays, April 2, 9, 16, & 23, 2009, Open Until 9:30pm

Thursday evenings mix cocktails, conversation, and adult-oriented programming
on science and the arts. Bar opens at 7pm.
A preview of new Thursday evening hours to begin permanently in October 2009

This April, find out what’s happening After Dark at the Exploratorium. New extended Thursday evening hours mix cocktails, conversation, and adult-oriented programming on science and the arts. Along with adult amenities such as music and a cash bar, each night will showcase a different theme: live performance [(etudes4violin&electronix, featuring DBR (violin) and DJ Scientific (laptop, turntables)] on April 2), films and new media (Photon/Pixel/Photon on April 9) and one night of Science After Dark (April 16, featuring Sideshow Science) — and a behind-the-scenes look at the Exploratorium on April 23rd. Programs will be playful, unusual, content-rich, and often involve cutting-edge technology. Not a theater, not a cabaret, not a gallery—but involving aspects of all three—After Dark has a mood unlike anywhere else in the city. Where else can you find an intellectually stimulating playground for adults—with free parking? This event is included in the price of admission. To be included in the Exploratorium After Dark email list, contact: afterdark@exploratorium.edu.

[Show as slideshow]

Thanks to generous support from the Koret Foundation, the Exploratorium will be open from 10am to 9:30pm on April 2, 9, 16, and 23, giving you the chance to mingle with artists, designers, scientists, inventors. Meet up with friends or take a date to Exploratorium After Dark.

The schedule in April is as follows:

Thursday, April 2
etudes4violin&electronix
Featuring DBR (violin) and DJ Scientific (laptop, turntables)
Bar opens at 7pm.
Performance begins at 8pm.

Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) and Elan Vyta (DJ Scientific) present solo and duet works from DBR’s recent album, etudes4violin&electronix, and from the critically acclaimed Sonata for Violin and Turntables, co-written by DBR and Vyta, his long-time collaborator and music remixer extraordinaire. In their musical exploration of contrasting cultures and instruments, DBR and DJ Scientific speak to the history and traditions of both classical and pop music genres. Listen as violin, turntables, and laptop sing, battle, and rhyme together, honoring a full spectrum of musical inventions.

Having carved a reputation for himself as an innovative composer, performer, violinist, and bandleader, Haitian-American artist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) melds his classical music roots with his own cultural references and vibrant musical imagination. As a composer, his works range from orchestral scores and chamber pieces to music for film, theater, modern dance, and electronica. BDR is currently Artist-in-Residence of the Seattle Theater Group and Music Director of Seattle’s More Music @ The Moore program. He is also the bandleader of the ensemble DBR & THE MISSION. www.dbrmusic.com

Producer, laptopist and DJ, Elan Vytal, aka DJ Scientific, combines precisely engineered hip-hop beats and scratched rhythms with classical and world music sounds, both live and sampled, creating a uniquely contemporary, yet accessible urban sonic experience. His debut album, My Reason, represents a myriad of collaborations with artists such as MC Mopeshi, Boogieshack, and the violinist Earl Maneein. Vytal collaborates extensively with DBR and is a member of DBR & THE MISSION. He is also Creative Music Director for international shoe brand Sketchers. www.elanvytal.com

Thursday, April 9
Building Visions: Photon/Pixel/Photon
Bar opens at 7pm.
Screening runs 7-9pm; Performance begins at 8pm.

Advanced Beauty
Skylight Area, 7–9pm

An ever-growing collaboration between programmers, artists, musicians, animators, and architects, Advanced Beauty is a series of digital artworks inspired and influenced by sound. In these video sound sculptures, computer algorithms create moving images that react to changes in the volume, pitch, or timbre of music.

The films in Advanced Beauty were made using a visual programming language called Processing, high-end audio analysis, and fluid dynamic simulations alongside traditional, hand-drawn cell animation. Each artist was given the same set of parameters: their work must start, finish, and exist within a white space, creating a seamless coherence, a shared environment wherein a single, floating pixel could be as engaging as a multicolored explosion.

Curated by Universal Everything and the musician Freeform, Advanced Beauty is an international collaboration, taking in a family of artists from London, Russia, New York, Japan, Buenos Aires, Glasgow, and San Francisco. http://advancedbeauty.org

Performance: Nate Boyce
McBean Theater, 7:30pm

Artist and musician Nate Boyce presents an audiovisual performance fusing digital and analog materials into a phenomenologically anomalous continuum. Oscillating between highly formalized permutations and raging turbulence, his real-time manipulations of extremely complex audiovisual timbres are simultaneously hypnotic and disorienting.

Nate Boyce is a video artist and musician who lives and works in San Francisco. His videos explore the thresholds of perceptual ambiguity. Through a wide range of customized analog and digital tools, his work explores the inherent plasticity of electronic sound and image. He has performed and exhibited at galleries and film festivals such as the New York Underground Film Festival, Deitch Projects, Center For Contemporary Art Glasgow, the Wattis Institute, Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, the Aurora Picture Show, Club Transmediale, Scope Art Fair, Monkeytown, The Stone, Galerie Alt Neu Brukte, and Queens Nails Annex.

Thursday, April 16
Science After Dark

Sideshow Science, a playful reframing of wondrous phenomena found inside the museum. For one night only, the Exploratorium transforms itself into a carnival of amazing animal acts, astounding forces of nature, mysterious mind reading, and thrilling games of skill and chance! Within these walls lurk some of the most astonishing phenomena found in Nature—the biggest freak show of all. Witness the whimsical and weird! Behold unbelievable technologies and test science that defies common sense! Do cosmic rays from the edge of time really pass through the Cloud Chamber? Do animals have more complicated cognitive skills than we ever imagined? Discover some of Nature’s strangest curiosities at Sideshow Science.

Featured Entertainments:
Gilda and her Trained Goldfish—See finned performers execute graceful feats of acrobatics under the gifted hands of the glamorous Gilda, Mistress of Fishes.

Wønderson Humpback—Risk games of chance, magic, and amusement with this cunning cardsharp—but beware of what may disappear before your very eyes.

Madam Yu and her Companion, the Beautiful and Strange Hermaphrodite, Planaria—watch Dr. Yu will chop charming Planaria into 237 pieces to transform her into 237 separate charming creatures! And meet her mutant companions, such as the glowing C. elegans, a marvelous creature that may hold the secret to the elixir of youth.

Mentalisms—Submit your thoughts to a mind reading machine—if you dare. You can also test your eyes on optical illusions, experience out-of-body travel and other reality-wrenching wonders, such as fortune-telling machines, the Anti-Gravity Mirror, the Distorted Room, and more like fortune-telling machines, proprioceptive (felt) illusions; immersive room experiences; levitation demos and more!

The 10,000 Mile Bike Race—This live performance is adapted from Alfred Jarry’s 1906 novel, The Supermale, which chronicles a 10,000 mile race between a locomotive and a five-man bicycle across Russian Siberia—a fantastic promotion for chemist William Elson’s “Perpetual Motion Food.”

During the performance, local filmmakers Jerome Hiler, Kerry Laitala, Paul Clipson, and Bill Basquin will accompany a blow-by-blow account of the race with film projections while an eight-piece ensemble plays music arranged for the event by local composer and bandleader Graham Connah. Konrad Steiner directs. The performance lasts 45 minutes. While musicians and narrator perform onstage, the filmmakers will orchestrate multiple projections, using beveled glass and other objects to contort and refract the imagery, filling the theater with light.

Thursday, April 23
Walking the Talk
Tours Begin at 7:30, 8:00, 8:30, and 9:00pm
An open terrain of phenomena-based exhibits, the Exploratorium is designed to be navigated freely, according to personal inclination and imagination. This evening, we invite you to encounter the museum through the eyes of local scientists and creative thinkers in a series of unique, half-hour walking tours.

From Inkling to Exhibit: A Behind-the-Scenes Tour
7:30 and 8:30pm
This walk takes you behind the scenes of our exhibit development process. Visit our busy machine shop while exhibit developers share their inspirations and challenges in building new exhibits. Since the Exploratorium is one of the only science museums in the country to research, design, prototype, and build its exhibits onsite, this tour is a rare opportunity to see how exhibits evolve.

What is the Sound of One Person Clapping—at the Echo Tube?
8 and 9pm
A flock displays beautiful choreography no individual bird could anticipate. A cascade of motions from the atomic to the atmospheric produces a turbulent vortex. In these emergent phenomena, knowledge of a system’s building blocks won’t tell you how the whole system behaves once those pieces interact. From vibrating plates to social systems, emergence is all around us—but how do we recognize and begin to comprehend it? On this tour, UC Davis’ Dr. Daniel Cox treats exhibits as working laboratories to illuminate the concept of emergence and its role in modern science.

The Ultimate Date Tour
7:30 and 8:30pm
Whether you’re on a first date or with your significant other, what better way to learn about each other than by exploring your perceptions together at specially chosen exhibits? Find out how hot your date actually is at Heat Camera or hold hands at Finger Tingler to feel for a spark. You can ask burning questions at our Emotion Tracer lie detector test, practice communication skills at Listening Vessels, preview potential offspring at Everyone is You and Me, pick up advice from the plant kingdom at Tricks of Love, and more. This Explainer-led tour is tailored to anyone who never wants to suffer through another bad date.

History of Science Walk
8 and 9pm
Many of our exhibits recreate great experiments in the history of science—experiments that forever changed our understanding of how the world works. Join senior staff scientist Dr. Richard Brown on a fascinating tour of scientific breakthroughs and discuss the radical changes surrounding these discoveries. Find out what beliefs prevailed before these experiments, how those beliefs were challenged, and how these revolutionary findings affect our lives today.

Hidden History of the Exploratorium
7:30pm and 9pm
While many of the exhibitions you see in the museum are of recent vintage—Mind, Listening, Seeing, Traits of Life—there is evidence scattered everywhere of exhibitions past. On this special tour, Director of Program and veteran staff member Dr. Rob Semper reveals the human history hidden within our oldest exhibits. Rob began his Exploratorium career as an exhibit developer in the 1970s. He’ll share stories of who made what, from what, and why.