Project Archive

The Lightbox has been the site of more than 80 projects. These have included art installations, artist talks, student projects, large scale data visualizations, Harvard classes, and more.

This is a partial list of projects.

Object Map

Utilizing the Harvard Art Museum API, the Object Map presents a visual map of the objects currently on display in the Harvard Art Museum. Using the remote you can select an image a view its metadata including information about where it is on display in the museum.

Project by metaLAB

JODI: OXO

The Harvard Art Museums present a new installation by JODI, the pioneering artist collective formed in 1994 by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans. One of the most influential artist duos working in the age of the Internet, JODI has produced a new project, OXO (2018), for the Lightbox Gallery, a collaborative space for digital projects on the museums’ uppermost level.

Based on the game tic-tac-toe, OXO is an interactive multichannel installation influenced by early computer games, including Noughts and Crosses or OXO, a game built in 1952 by Alexander S. Douglas. JODI’s installation responds to this early history of computing, war games, and artificial intelligence, thinking through the game tic-tac-toe as an important cultural artifact. Visit the Lightbox Gallery to play OXO throughout the installation.

New Digs and Discoveries at Sardis in Turkey

This project, in conjunction with the Sardis department, presents the new excavation finds and current research from the Sardis expedition in Turkey.

Vincent van Gogh's Three Pairs of Shoes

This project was a collaboration across Harvard Art Museums. DIET in conjunction with conservation demonstrates how conservators use light to analyze and visual information that helps to study Vincent van Gogh’s Three Pairs of Shoes. Coded in JavaScript, the interactive element of this project uses a remote to navigate the storyline behind the process and to add and/or remove annotation layers.

Exploring Light

This 1-day project presents how conservators study and examine paintings through technologies. It utilizes a remote to page through images.

The Solar

In collaboration with Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Henry Trae Winter III the Lightbox displayed The Solar. The Solar is a video project that demonstrates how astrophysicists study the sun by viewing it in different wavelengths while collecting ‘big data’.

Cambridge Science Festival 2016

(In)visible: Light in Astronomy and Art Conservation

This project is a collaboration between affiliates of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Harvard Art Museums to explore different forms of light and looking. The two interactive case studies presented here document these different processes of exam-ination. On the left, explore how an astronomer uses x-rays to study and visualize a supernova remnant. On the right, follow how art conser-vators use visible light and x-rays to learn about the develop-ment of Van Gogh's painting Three Pairs of Shoes.

Imaging Unseen Layers in Paintings

04/15/2016
Works of art can preserve hidden clues to the artist’s process and to changes and restorations they may have incurred over time. Join Kate Smith, associate paintings conservator at the Harvard Art Museums, for a closer look at what various wavelength bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, invisible to the human eye, reveal about the life of three paintings in the collection.

Light on Rothko’s Harvard Murals and Planck’s Cosmic Microwave Background

04/16/2016
What do Mark Rothko’s Harvard Murals and the Planck space telescope's Cosmic Microwave Background have in common? Ronald Stark, head of astronomy at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and Francesca Bewer, research curator for conservation and technical studies at the Harvard Art Museums, explore the poetic parallels between Rothko’s paintings and their recent restoration and the unveiling of the earliest detected structure of the universe through a sequence of light subtractions.

Cassiopeia A in a New Light

04/17/2016
Cassiopeia A has long been a favorite target in the sky for astronomers. Its enormous filaments of glowing hot gas trace the remains of a star that was destroyed in a violent explosion hundreds of years ago. The left over glow from the explosion, shining brightly in X-ray light, is known as a supernova remnant. Joseph DePasquale, Visualization Scientist for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides an in-depth look at how data from the observatory are analyzed and prepared to produce stunning views of this enigmatic celestial source.

Coloring the Universe

04/18/2016
Pink planets and Green galaxies? Is space really so colorful? Get a behind-the-scenes tour of our vibrant Universe from Kimberly Arcand, Visualization Lead for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. With data from the Chandra, Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes we'll look at what goes into the kaleidoscope of color in astronomical images

Franz Marc’s Three Horses

04/19/2016
Franz Marc, a key figure of German Expressionism and cofounder of the Blue Rider Group, is well known for his paintings of animals in bold colors. Grazing Horses IV (The Red Horses) is considered the breakthrough work of this unique style, which depicts animals as the pivotal focus and frees color from a merely representational function, using it instead as an autonomous pictorial medium. Andrea von Hedenstroem, graduate paintings conservation fellow in the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums, will discuss new findings about the painter’s materials and techniques that resulted from the SCC’s in-depth investigation of the work in preparation for its inclusion in the exhibition Franz Marc - Between Utopia and Apocalypse at the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel, Germany.

The Typology

04/20/2016
Artifacts are often presented with human interpretation, but what can we learn simply by looking? TYPOLOGY, a photography project by Diana Zlatanovski, Collections Steward at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, communicates both the significance and the aesthetic beauty of object collections. A typology is an assemblage based on a shared attribute. Through observing groups of similar things their variations become evident; information not apparent in isolation becomes visible in context. Zlatanovski’s project explores multitudes of both private and museum collections; her visual presentation will focus on scientific collections from the storage cabinets at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History.

Seeing the Universe in Color with the WorldWide Telescope

04/21/2016
Alyssa Goodman, Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy, will take visitors on a tour of the night sky, and of the Universe around them, using a program called “WorldWide Telescope.” The presentation will be interactive, so visitors will be asked for destinations-- either in the Universe, or in the electromagnetic spectrum--and Prof. Goodman will explain the chosen objects or colors significance to astrophysics. Desktop and internet browser based versions of the WorldWide Telescope are available for free, at: http://worldwidetelescope.org

Viewing the Active Sun

04/22/2016
Solar astronomers create near-real time videos of the sun in wavelengths that are not visible to the naked eye. Often, we think of the Sun as a relatively unchanging, blinding yellow ball. When viewed in the ultraviolet range, the atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona, reveals itself to be highly complex and constantly changing. Henry “Trae” Winter III, astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will discuss his project for the Lightbox Gallery in the Harvard Art Museums that serves as a kind of virtual telescope, looking in near-real time at the sun.

The Art and Science of New England Herbs

04/23/2016
Several herbs that grow in New England can be found depicted in the Harvard Art Museums’ collections. Lian Bruno, local herbalist, will present works of art that feature such herbs and provide an overview of how to identify them growing around town. Bruno will discuss the properties and basic phytochemistry of these regional herbs, as well as their use in historical and current remedies.

A Look at Magnetized Star Formation Through Radio Eyes

04/24/2016
What do infant, forming stars look like at radio wavelengths? And how to magnetic fields affect the formation of these "protostars," some of which will eventually evolve into stars like our own Sun? Chat Hull, a Jansky Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, will take visitors on a tour of magnetized stellar birth through the eyes of ALMA, the world's most powerful radio telescope.