On the evening of April 8, a few dozen white-clad walkers will approach the Utah State Capitol slowly, methodically, on their way to participation in a large-scale performance, called "Awaiting." The performers will appear throughout the city and gather on the south steps of the Capitol at sunset, then spend the night and early morning ascending and descending the Capitol's iconic stairs.

The performance piece is the work of Ernesto Pujol, an artist born in Cuba and currently in residence at the University of Utah's department of art and art history. Pujol is gathering the performers as a commentary on consciousness, landscape, architecture, meditation, and, of course, waiting.

Ernesto Pujol

The piece, also part of his residency at the University, has participation from visual arts and dance students, as well as the work of local artist Rosi Hayes, who is designing a soundtrack for the piece. Pujol did undergraduate work in humanities, visual arts, art history, philosophy and theology, and graduate work in education, art therapy, communications and media theory. He has an MFA in interdisciplinary art studio practice from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

But it's his meditative work that stands out in "Awaiting." Each performer brings his or her silent thoughts to the piece, communing with the audience, which forms a "permeable urban cloister wall, the outer circle of the performance, completing it with their own patient, silent thoughts as they witness it," Pujol said.

The performance runs overnight from 6 p.m. April 8 to 7 a.m. April 9 at the Utah State Capitol. For more information, visit the performance site.

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Who hasn't dreamed of being invisible? It would give you the ablilty to listen to private conversation, and you would always be the one crowned hide-n-go-seek champ. Aside from those daily niceties, invisibility technology could give us the ability to hide planes, protect coasts from tsunami waves, and even protect buildings from earthquakes. All kinds of different technologies are being developed to make people and objects invisible. But how does one make something invisible?

Humans see only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we are "see" an object when light bounces off of it into our eyes. To mimic or create invisibility, there are several ways you can can disrupt the process of "seeing" an object.

Let's start with this simplest: camouflage. Animals, soldiers, and hunters use it everyday. Wilderness settings are relatively easy to blend into, but what if you want to blend into a more complicated terrain? You could mimic artist and extreme camouflage-er, Liu Bolin, who paints himself to blend in with his surroundings.

Check out more of Bolin's art here.

But what if you need to blend in at a moment's notice? The folks over at the Tachi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo have developed an invisibility cloak of sorts. The cloak films objects behind you and projects them onto your jacket so you will blend into any background.

Graeme Milton will be giving a lecture about cloaking at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10, in the Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology building. The lecture is free and open to the public, but you need to request tickets by emailing your first and last name with the number of tickets requested to office@science.utah.edu. See you there!

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Jeff Muhs, executive director at Utah State University Energy Lab, will discuss new initiatives from his lab, such as creating biofuels from algae and automated electric transportation, which will make energy mobile. Other presenters include Kevin Shurtleff, who is a member of the USTAR Technology Outreach team, and Lynsey Talbot, who is a student energy researcher at Utah State University.

The University of Utah's Marriott Library was constructed and opened in 1968. For the past 4 years the library has undergone an intense renovation. The restoration included the addition of the ARC, which is a robotic management tool for the library's collection. Seismic and other safety upgrades were also made, much like The Leonardo's building is currently undergoing.

Francis H. Brown, distinguished professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, will lecture Nov. 24 about the "Geologic Control of the Age of Early Man. Graeme W. Milton, a professor of mathematics at the University of Utah, will present "Cloaking: Where Science Meets Science Fiction," March 10. Ronald L. Walsworth, senior physicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, presents the final lecture "The Search for Earth-like Planets Around Other Stars," April 7.

Octogenarian Bliss recently overcame a year-long period of blindness, following with cataract surgery, an experience that she compared to "coming out of solitary confinement." Her career in the state stretches back decades, though, and includes several public art pieces at major buildings around town, such as the University of Utah's Cowles Building on Presidents Circle and the State Capitol Building.

Good news for local art fans, too: Black Opal Productions is putting together a documentary about this woman's fascinating life and storied career: "ARC of LIGHT: A Portrait of Anna Campbell Bliss." (We can't embed this particular link, but do watch -- Anna is brilliant.)

A couple of us at The Leonardo had the pleasure of chatting with Anna recently and she reassured us that she has at least a good 10 years left in her -- she has a lot she wants to accomplish and intends to continue her role as a self-proclaimed "misfit locally" in the art scene. We're also looking forward to forging a partnership with her for The Leo building down the road.

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Muhs, who was at one point an energy and science policy advisor to the U.S. Senate, recently testified before Congress about the plausbility of using algae to capture and recycle carbon-dioxide emissions and create oil in the process. Muhs is also a USTAR researcher.

In theory, algae farms can be anywhere there is enough sunlight for the plants, and part of Muhs' research is optimizing sunlight absorption and thus increasing the amount of fuel produced. Other biofuel researchers are exploring creative placements for algae ponds -- next to wastewater treatment plants (the, ahem, natural organics in the wastewater can be part of the algae "food"), in shallow desert pools in the sunny southwestern United States, or next to coal plants where algae could convert waste carbon dioxide to biofuel.

You may remember the Continental Airlines test flight this January with half a tank of conventional jet fuel and half a tank of algae- and jatropha-produced biofuel. Continental joined Air New Zealand and Japan Airlines, among others, in testing biofuels as an alternative to conventional jet fuel. Even though large-scale algae fuel production is likely still several years away, the promise of this biofuel has caught the attention of the airlines, Congress and R/D communities throughout the country.

So, please, join us Wednesday, June 3, at the Salt Lake City Public Library for a discussion about how the hated pond scum of yesteryear could become the future of fuel. (To register for Lunch with Leo, visit its web page. The event is open to the public, and the $25 fee pays for your meal.)

We spend a lot of time around here thinking about interactivity, how to engage visitors and what The Leonardo could use to get people excited about learning. Back in February 2008, The Leonardo ran a month-long workshop in South Towne mall where one of the emphases was on sound and music. Visitors -- especially teenagers -- were enthralled by the composition and general tinkering they could accomplish with GarageBand, LogicPro, a midi keyboard and a couple of iMacs.

Fast forward to the AAM conference in Philadelphia last month, and a session about gestural computer interactives. Among the many interesting things in that session was a tidbit about Ocarina, an iPhone and iPod touch application that turns your hand-held device into a musical instrument.Ocarina is the brainchild of a Stanford assistant professor, who has also created an iPhone orchestra -- members "play" their phones and amplify the sound by speakers attached to the back of their hands.

Ocarina (named for an ancient flute-like instrument) has a global setting as well, giving players a chance to listen to what people are doing with the application all over. The original application has a "Zeldrian" tone setting, and Wang has figured out how to play Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" on the iPhone. You can also check out a free trial of the company's leaf trombone that's worth your time for the memories of junior-high band class, if nothing else.

Although Wang doesn't come out and say it, Ocarina tweaks familiar technology to allow entry points to those unfamiliar with an instrument, and it has great potential for getting people interested in music, technology and sound.

If you haven't made it to Utah County yet for the BYU Museum of Art Dan Steinhilber exhibition, make it a priority before it closes on June 6! This excellent contemporary art display has a great use of everyday materials "to examine the wonder that can be found all around us," as the BYU MOA website points out.

And it is wondrous: dry cleaning hangers naturally twist in elegant spirals from the ceiling to unintentionally mimic a double helix, a bulk of inflated trash bags assault gallery circulation space and a heat lamp warms and lights the air below it.

Contemporary art curator Jeff Lambson ran across Steinhilber's work when Lambson was with the Hirshhorn Museum (part of the Smithsonian group) in Washington, D.C. The two worked together (along with a small army of assistants) to create the undulating "Untitled (2003/2008): Duck sauce" and "Untitled (2003/2008): Laytex balloons" -- unique pieces made of decidedly non-natural materials that still echo organic forms. The balloon piece began fully inflated, but had already shrunk and tightened a few weeks into the exhibition. Part of the sculpture's wonder is its life cycle -- what will it become as the balloons naturally deflate through the course of the exhibition?

Steinhilber's ingenuity appeals to our DIY side, too. Jeff Lambson explained recently that "Untitled (2008): Trash bags and greenhouse plastic" arrived folded into Steinhilber's suitcase, rather than via a costly gallery shipping service!

"InterPlay: AnARTomy" features two dancers, poetry, a host of sketch artists, and digital animators, and requires nearly a dozen computer systems to compile live video feeds from four other universities. The video feed of the sketchers and performers in other locations --Indianapolis, Indiana; Fairbanks, Alaska; Long Island, New York; and Cardiff, Wales -- are projected and "mixed" on a large screen behind the dancers. InterPlay is the work of Jimmy and Beth Miklavcic.




During the year-long development process, the Miklavcics meet with participants via open-source video conferencing software. Then, the "telematic" performance is woven into a multi-leveled, live performance and cinematic work that incorporates feeds from artists, musicians and technicians at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianpolis (IUPUI),University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Long Island University in New York, and Cardiff University in Wales (full bios of the cast and crew can be found here). The performance is designed specifically for viewing at the University of Utah Intermountain Network and Scientific Computation Center (INSCC), giving Utah audiences the best seats in the country.


An operator during the performance arranges the screens dependent on what the dancers, animators and artists are doing. Digital MC Jimmy Miklavcic manipulates the relationships between the various performances by combining the video streams into the center digital mix of the display -- all to create a dynamic, collaborative performance. "This thing is so intertwined that calling it art and technology isn't correct because they're so symbiotic in a way," Beth and Jimmy Miklavcic tell us.




Beth and Jimmy will be giving a presentation about their previous InterPlay project -- Nel Tempo Di Sogno (2007) -- Thursday, April 16, at 1 p.m. at the University of Utah's Center for High Performance Computing. They'll talk about the scene-by-scene tech requirements to pull off an InterPlay performance.