As visitors touch, turn, and manipulate the artworks, patterns emerge and questions arise. In Static Landscape, thousands of tiny steel balls cascade across the surface of a large shallow disk, generating electrical charges. Static forces organize the balls into dazzling waves and other intricate patterns that resemble the lightning in Jupiter's atmosphere, or the solar winds that charge the soil of the Moon and other bodies not protected by a magnetic field. Visitors can form and change the patterns by tilting the disk and running their hands over its surface. Another sculpture called the Dust Devil has a vortex encased in a cylinder that sweeps up fine particles of sand to form a swirling dust devil.
Visitors activate the vortex and watch it shift and move.
As particles drift in and out of the vortex, the image suggests the dust devils of the Martian atmosphere. Accompanying the sculptures are photographs taken during space flights and on Earth. These images reveal patterns that resemble those created in the sculptures. The traveling exhibition is managed by the Association of Science-Technology Centers Incorporated. Cratering Plunge a rod into fine sand to form craters.