Observables
"A convergence of space and time."
Observables is a body of work that interrogates the "time-lag" of the universe — materializing the moment where objective data dissolves into a personal encounter with the cosmos. Every photon that reaches the human eye is a fossil: a fragment of light that departed its source moments, centuries, or billions of years ago. This foundational truth of physics is the conceptual engine driving the collection. Rather than presenting the cosmos as a backdrop for wonder, Observables treats light-travel time as an active material — one that warps perception, collapses history, and renders every act of looking an act of remembering.
Spanning kinetic installation, mixed reality, archival photography, tactile sculpture, stereoscopic imaging, and generative audio, the twelve works in the collection each approach this latency from a different angle. Some make it visceral — a video mirror that shows you as you were years ago. Others make it historical — astrophotographs of galaxies rendered in the aesthetic of the human civilizations that existed when that light first departed. Taken together, the works form a sustained inquiry into presence, perception, and the radical displacement of "now" that underlies all astronomical observation.
Kinetic latex and pneumatics installation evoking the Big Bang — expansion and collapse on a human scale.
Long-exposure astrophotography rendering Earth's rotation as arcing trails of starlight across the night sky.
Tablet mirrors calibrated to the light-travel time of solar system objects, showing the viewer as they were minutes or years ago.
Custom View-Master reels presenting 3D views of the solar system juxtaposed with with modern corporate spacefarers.
Archival prints pairing deep-sky astrophotography with AI-reconstructed scenes from the historical era when that light departed.
Generative audio piece driven by pulsar timing data, translating the universe's most precise clocks into sound.
Laminar flow fog screen installation creating a luminous, touch-responsive membrane at the threshold of the observable.
Cast relief sculptures derived from scientific topographic data of planetary surfaces and cosmic phenomena.
Data-driven light sculpture that monitors real-time atmospheric conditions and illuminates when the night sky is optimal for observation.
Virtual reality experience simulating gravitational tidal forces near a black hole.
Virtual reality visualization of the Cosmic Microwave Background — the oldest light in the universe.
Room-scale installation mapping the Doppler redshift of receding galaxies into an immersive chromatic environment.
Observables represents a culmination of Todd Margolis's career at the intersection of science, technology, and immersive art. Drawing on decades of work in virtual reality, data visualization, augmented reality, and large-scale collaborative systems — from co-inventing the Varrier™ autostereoscopic display at EVL to designing discovery platforms at the Qualcomm Institute — Margolis has consistently used technology to make invisible systems perceptible. With Observables, that inquiry turns inward and upward simultaneously: toward the cosmos, and toward the limits of human perception itself.
About Todd
My work functions as a sensory intervention, utilizing the tools of rigorous research to materialize complex data as a felt experience. They explore the mediated experience of human intuition with algorithmic logic, turning abstract information into immersive physical or visual form.
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