Lovely Dark

While the kaleidoscope is an age-old technology, Gaspar Battha created an elaborate, futuristic sculpture that combines elements of this traditional construction with new media. Titled “Patterns of Harmony,” the sculpture’s multi-faceted surface fractures projections of repeating, electric blue cubes into moving, psychedelic visuals.

Battha created this piece as an exploration of geometry: its importance to art and design principles as well as to natural processes. In his artist statement, he posed the following questions: “Why is a cube constructed as it is and why do we find the same shapes and geometrical structures on the largest as well as on the smallest scales of the cosmos? Is geometry only an illusion of our senses or is it an essential building block of the universe?”

Although better known for her Silver Screen exploits, Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) also became a pioneer in the field of wireless communications following her emigration to the United States. The international beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, developed a "Secret Communications System" to help combat the Nazis in World War II. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted by enemy personnel. Lamarr and Anthiel received a patent in 1941, but the enormous significance of their invention was not realized until decades later. It was first implemented on naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequently emerged in numerous military applications. But most importantly, the "spread spectrum" technology that Lamarr helped to invent would galvanize the digital communications boom, forming the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations possible.