Visitors to the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. will get a taste of the South Pole Telescope when a traveling exhibit comes their way on April 28-29. The University of Chicago’s Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics will present the exhibit, “100 Years of Exploration @ South Pole: From Survival to Science,” which was produced by a studio class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Part of the exhibit will appear at the World Science Festival, which takes place May 30 to June 3 in New York City, including the June 3 World Science Street Festival in Washington Square Park.
The exhibit was a class project led by Bo Rodda, an adjunct professor of the SAIC’s department of architecture, interior architecture and designed objects. He also is a building intelligence and energy efficiency specialist at Argonne National Laboratory, which is a member of the SPT collaboration.
“The students, for the most part, all signed up for the class because they are naturally interested in space and science,” said Rodda, whose class met with scientists at UChicago and Adler Planetarium before designing the exhibit.
"Artists and scientists have much more in common than most people would think. At the root of what drives us, I feel, is an insatiable curiosity about the world and a desire to discover. When artists and scientists begin to work together, amazing things happen,” he said.