The Leonardo After Hours: Energy Revolution event in Logan last week was a huge success with a ton of audience participation. Thanks to our presenters and our host, The Italian Place, which supplied nourishment (energy!) for the crowd. Take a look at our recap video, with interviews with all three presenters:

Every year in Sundance's documentary competition, stand-out movies feature environmental impact topics. The premiere of An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 started this tradition. Some movies show how our environment is changing (Climate Refugees, 2010), and others show us what we can do to change (No Impact Man, 2009).

Fox initially planned a 5-minute short that would show how natural gas drilling worked and what kind of impact it would have. However, that small tasked turned into a huge project after he found out that fracking, the process they use to extract natural gas, was contaminating the natural watershed. As Fox traveled around the country he found that in almost every town near drilling, drinking water had been contaminated with...well, too many chemicals to name.

The Leo on Wheels officially has a completely new look complete with a new trailer, T-shirts and exhibit displays. The Mona Lisa trailer wrap has been retired after almost five years of service and tens of thousands of miles on the road.

Digital plant from Daniel Brown's series, "Flowers."

"The Network," dissects traces of information we leave behind after using social networks. Programers developed a section that visualizes information, such as how bloggers are feeling based upon what they say in their blogs. "Code," looks at the digital coding we use to program. Artist Daniel Brown uses mathematics to generate a fluid growth of digital images that mimics plants found in nature. Much like "Ghost Interruptions," the "Interactivity" exhibit allows visitors to interact with different works. One of the featured exhibits is the Opto-Isolator, developed by Golan Levin, which is a robotic eye that follows the viewer's eye motions.

One of the highlight of the event was the soap-film wall prototype. Our exhibits team worked hard this past month to make the wall. Viewers learned the science behind the bubble -- light refraction, wave patterns and surface tension -- and stuck their hands in it and blew bubbles. All in all, it was a delightful evening for the 150-or-so attendees!

The Leonardo is thrilled to be up for two Artys from the City Weekly this year -- the first is to vote for BODY WORLDS 3 as the best traveling exhibit of 2008, and the second is to vote for The Leonardo-sponsored play, "di Esperienza," as best original play.

In case you need a recap, here's our BODY WORLDS site, complete with a run-down of the exhibit, the programs and events we ran concurrent with the exhibit, and all your favorite imagery from the world-class exhibit.

"di Esperienza" was commissioned by The Leonardo and produced by Plan B Theatre Company this spring. In the play, three of Leonardo da Vinci's famous artworks confront him at the end of his life. Matthew Ivan Bennett wrote the piece, and here's a little more information about his work from Salt Lake Magazine:

Vote before August 24, and we'll share the good news of our awards (fingers crossed!) with you!

Bonneville Speed Week -- a collection of the craziest, fastest, most surreal races in the state -- starts this weekend. You've seen the Salt Flats in movies and photo shoots, but this lunar world takes on an entirely different milieu when covered with hundreds of DIY dragsters, a bevy of multi-colored umbrellas and the friendly faces of Speed Week's followers.

The Salt Flats are home to several land speed records, made possible by Utah's high desert altitude, and the extremely flat surface that is inhospitable to plant life and other barriers to a racer's ultimate goal. The Salt Flats are no secret (memorialized by an article in The New York Times here, a star turn in "The World's Fastest Indian," and regular features and photos in regional news media), but that makes them no less fascinating.

One of the best things about Speed Week is the DIY culture among racers. The majority of enthusiasts work solo or in small groups to perfect their home-grown cars, dragsters, motorcycles and other vehicles. Trial and error, a dauntless enthusiasm for the Flats, and near-obsessive tendencies combine for one amazing weekend of race after race.

This video from the 2007 races gets really good around the 2:00 mark (it's not ours, so please pardon anything strange -- like, say, the intro song lyrics). It gives a true sense of the DIY culture and life-long ambitions of racers to participate in Speed Week.

But this is the one that held me captivated at my desk -- a handlebars-eye-view of a motorcycle hitting 229 mph on a five-mile course. Once it gets going, you can watch the miles fly by and see the spectators distantly to the left of the course. And be sure to listen to the accompanying audio for the whine of the gears as the drive accelerates through the course.

So if you head out this weekend, be sure to strike up a conversation or five with the racers -- it's been my experience that they'll gladly geek out with you about their projects. You might even pick up a few tricks for the drive back to civilization. Just don't forget your sunblock.

A British scientist and student in science communication came up with an intriguing project to get people talking and thinking about the impact of science in their lives. Dr. Tim Jones' simple concept was to ask people to draw what they think is important about science. He stitched the drawings together (with a nod to the "exquisite corpse" methods of the surrealists, hence his title) and created a video with the participants talking about their drawings.

There are many things that I like about this project -- the thought of getting the public involved in the conversation about science, the art, and the variety AND similarity in response. My favorite part, though, is the 14-year-old's drawing. His free-form links between the various parts of science that affect his life end up being more profound and real to me than, say, the scientist's representation of the scientific method.

I like the basic way that he's gotten folks to consider the impact and importance of science in their lives. I'd love to hear how they prepped their "artists" before drawing and interviewing. The project reaffirms my belief that the simplest things are often the most effective, and frequently the most intriguing.

Jones (@physicus) is taking his project wide and calling for submissions for the next version of The Exquisite Corpse of Science. Join his efforts, and comment or tweet back at us (@the_leonardo) if you do. We'd love to see what you come up with.

Adding to the list of gadgets that you never knew you needed in life is this Chalkbot, a machine that "prints" road chalk messages for the Livestrong Foundation and Nike.

It's making the rounds of France during the year's biggest bike race -- check out the photo gallery. The content of the uniformly heart-warming messages show a deep concern for cancer victims and survivors. Beyond that, though, the mechanics of this thing are pretty cool.

Aside from the canisters of chalk and the hydraulic release system, it looks like there's a pretty beefy internal tech system. It would be interesting to see whether the text messages are translated directly to the road chalk or if they go through a human screener first.

The Leonardo experimented with SMS art during BODY WORLDS when Brooklyn-based artist Paul Notzold created "The Only Certainty: Death and TXTs," a flash skeleton projection that changed positions and thought bubbles based on text messages from visitors.

As The Leonardo susses out its exhibit plans, the staff are talking more about how to interest visitors with what happens inside the museum beyond just a static, "typical" museum experience. When we try different applications, workshops and exhibits, one thing we keep coming back to is stop-motion animation.

In a workshop back in February 2008, we did a short stint with some stop-motion animation cameras. These were a HUGE hit with visitors of all ages, to put it mildly, both back then and in a few events since then. And it appears that the art form is making a bit of a mainstream come-back as well. It's been great to uncover little gems, and to see animation become a creative vehicle in ways that the Wallace and Gromit of my childhood didn't quite capture.

This run-away YouTube hit by Oren Lavie is incredibly whimsical. Guaranteed* to melt your insides. (*almost)

Finally, I love this designer's interpretation of a deadline (and it's a bit how I feel at the moment with the Arts Festival installation rapidly approaching!).

Museum hopping in San Francisco can be exhilarating and exhausting. Fortunately, a couple of staff members made it to the city by the bay last weekend to check out a few choice science and art museums. Among other trip highlights was a trip to the California Academy of Sciences sustainability exhibit, a visit to the Cal Academy's famed living rooftop and the chance to play with the butterflies in the rain forest globe.

Another great highlight of the trip was a visit to the SubZERO Festival in San Jose. The festival, run by the folks at Zer01 (who also do a tres cool biennial), was an eclectic collection of street art, low-tech displays, audience interaction, and performance. One thing that caught our eye was a video installation by Eric Dorf, who filmed people's reactions to popular ads and edited them together.

The result is a strangely mesmerizing mosaic of Madison Avenue and mouths. The video we saw at subZERO was slightly modified from this YouTube clip, but you'll get the general idea from this version. We tip our figurative Leo hat to Dorf for his creative mash-up that stopped us in our tracks and kept us engaged, focused and interested with all the distractions of a street fair happening around us!

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.

"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.