Remembering Bob Miller

The Artist and Science educator Bob Miller died on Sunday. This is very sad news indeed. He and his work may be familiar to many of you from San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

I met him only once, on the evening of April 23rd 2006 at a Categorically Not! event. From that short time I got a sense of his enthusiasm for explaining many phenomena in optics and other aspects of physics to anyone who would listen. He was a unique and highly original person in every positive sense of those words, and his passing is a great loss. The Cat Not! event during which I saw him in action (see clickable image on right) describing optical illusions and other phenomena was one of the most delightful such evenings that I can recall. After re-reading my report on the event, I thought I’d share it with you as a celebration of his life. It is the previous post, and it has links to some of Bob’s work.

Bob Miller was a dear friend of science writer K. C. Cole, and so (with her permission) I am reproducing here a piece that she wrote about Bob Miller not too long ago. It is a fitting tribute. -cvj

____________________________

The physicist Frank Oppenheimer used to say that artists and scientists are the official “noticers” of society—people whose business it is to notice things that other people either never learned to see or have learned to ignore.

I’ve never known anyone with quite the knack for noticing as San Francisco artist Bob Miller, and since I’ve known him, countless things I used to think quite ordinary have been animated by his imagination. Once he asked me: How would you suspend 500,000 pounds of water in the air with no visible means of support?

Answer: Build a cloud.

Needless to say, clouds have never looked quite the same to me since.

Neither has dawn. Before I met Bob, I never thought about the continual wave of people rising from their beds that sweeps round the globe as the shadow of night lifts time zone by time zone—much like the wave that runs through the crowd at a ballgame. Except that the rising tide of people is a wave never ends.

I think of this “wave” as a kinetic sculpture that Bob placed permanently inside my head.

(The U.S. patent office didn’t get this concept at all. One of Bob’s sculptures is a collection of three-sided corners that flip into eerily floating cubes as you walk by. When Frank Oppenheimer encouraged him to patent this idea many years ago, they were both amused when the request was turned down. The reason? The bureaucrats objected that he couldn’t patent something that existed only in someone’s mind.)

As if there’s a piece of art or science that doesn’t.
(The patent office later relented.)

Bob’s signature piece is probably his Sun Painting, which begins with a beam of plain white light from the sun, refracted through a rack of prisms, then sliced with thin mirrors into a palette of pure colors—Bob’s “paints.”

The late poet Muriel Rukeyser was inspired by this work to write a poem for Bob called The Sun Painter.
“…a lashing of color. Not color, strands of light. Not light but pure deep color beyond color… A sensitive web of light changing, for the sun moved, the air moves. The perceiver moves…You have invited us all. Allow the sunlight, dance your dance.”

Before I met Bob, I labored, like most people, under the misconception that the green of the grass, the red of the car outside my window, the yellow of the neighbor’s cat, come from objects. But no, they come from the sun—the purple of that Laker’s flag a gift from a star 93 million miles away.

In my mind’s eye, Bob “painted” white light in brilliant colors as surely as Lewis Carroll’s playing cards painted the Queen’s white roses red.

He’s done the same thing to shadows, which I used to see as black and white. Now, I see a shadow as a “negative image” that contains as much information as “positive” images. Bob makes a spellbinding case for this in a piece of performance art (called his “light walk”) that takes about three hours. But to get an idea: You know that a pinhole camera (in essence, a box with a pinhole poked in one end) can make an image of any scene, moving or static. If instead of a hole, you use a “speck” to cast a shadow, you create a complementary image.

So if you make a simple pinhole image of a bright sun with a dark tree branch crossing the disk, a pin “speck” produces a dark sun crossed by a bright tree branch.

During a solar eclipse viewing in the Black Sea, after Bob wowed astronomers with his light tricks; he did the same for the artists that night sitting in a bar. Using a small piece of cheese suspended on a hair as a “pin speck,” he cast colored shadows of some brightly colored lights. The shadow image appeared not only upside down and reversed, as you might expect, but also in complementary colors—the red turned to turquoise, the blue to yellow.

To Bob, there’s no such thing as uninteresting diffuse white light. It’s awash with images, bursting with brilliant colors; they only need to be separated out, like voices in a crowd. Whether we do it with holes, or specks, doesn’t matter. (Making lifelike portraits out of holes and specks is one of Bob’s specialties.)

Bob often says that the worst disease afflicting humankind is “hardening of the categories”—our futile attempts to cram things into boxes, and keep them there. Boxes like “art” and “science,” for example.

These categories become blinders that prevent us from noticing: the weight of clouds, the colors of white, the light in shadows, the opportunities in obstacles.

Bob’s “artist’s statement” sums it up:

“Blobs, spots, specks, smudges, cracks, defects, mistakes, accidents, exceptions
and irregularities are the windows to other worlds.”

-K.C. Cole

____________________________