A Public Artwork. A Collaboration. A Celebration of Space, Time, and CU Boulder’s Contribution to Space Exploration.

The SpaceTime Underpass

Located near the Fiske Planetarium on CU Boulder’s beautiful campus, the Regent Underpass is a high-traffic passage for students which provides an interesting opportunity for public artwork.

Spearheaded by artists Martha Russo and Bruce Price, this project is a large-scale collaboration between multiple CU Boulder departments, working professionals, artists, and Colorado businesses, all to share a celebration of the significant contribution CU Boulder has made to space exploration.

About the Site:

The Regent Underpass is the east entrance to a pedestrian pathway that stretches across the CU Boulder campus. In 1986, markers representing the planets were added to the path-way as a memorial to astronaut and CU alum, Ellison Onizuka. The underpass is situated between the planetary markers for Mars and Jupiter.

About the Art:

The asteroid belt within our solar systems falls exactly in this same area, between Mars and Jupiter. The SpaceTime Underpass project has been influenced by this relationship and will be furnished with colored concrete relief panels, textured with 3D topographical date from two dwarf: Ceres & Vesta. These are the two largest objects within the belt, and were visited recently by the NASA JPL Dawn Mission space probe.

Below the concrete panels will be metal etched with the names of CU alumni, faculty, and staff who have advanced CU’s considerable contributions to space science and exploration. The goal of the installation is to greatly enhance the thematic quality of the pathway in the underpass.

The project will also pay homage to experimental composer John Cage, and his world-renowned piece 4’33”, a three-movement composition which instructs the performer(s) not to play their instruments for the duration of the piece. In this manner, John Cage’s work creates a space of silence which is then filled with the sounds of the environment.

Research Artifacts:

Through the exploration of techniques necessary to accomplish this project, multiple research artifacts have been produced which themselves, have grown into a multiplicity of artworks. Several of these were featured at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in November of 2017.

This included the series Transmissivity by artist Devin Johnson

Furthermore, several convivial objects are currently being developed by artist Bruce Price and engineering students Galen Melchert and Sam Brown, and will be produced for sale in the near future. One such object will be a unique ceramic bowl based on the topographical data from the dwarf-planet Ceres:

Timeline:

Fall 2017:
Aesthetics: Art and Engineering Class
Artist lead intern team
Renderings of the surfaces
Material & Production Investigations
Completed Scale Model & Proposal

Fall 2018:
Aesthetics: Art and Engineering Class
2nd Artist lead intern team
Installation & Dedication
Future Programming Development

 

Media:

Public Relations will be a collaboration between professionals and the University of Colorado Boulder Office of Strategic Relations. Further distribution will be sought from NASA.

Media inquiries: Devin Johnson – devinrossjohnson@gmail.com

 

Links:

 

Contributors:

 

Contributing Companies: