If you’ve passed through downtown Santa Rosa, chances are you’ve seen Sebastopol resident Ned Kahn’s artwork on the side of the AT&T building. Shimmering, silvery waves play across the side of the building in complex patterns, which deceivingly evoke thoughts of complex computer programs and multitudes of precisely timed lights. But Kahn’s installation is surprisingly low-tech. Made up of hundreds of small, hinged aluminum panels, the piece moves with the slightest breeze, showing the turbulence of air currents normally unseen.

During his lecture, “The Granular State of Matter” in Newman Auditorium on Sept. 26, Kahn discussed his world-renowned art installations in Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Charlotte, N.C. and Germany, and his philosophy of combining artwork with the excitement of scientific experimentation.

“I started thinking about if I could possibly make artwork that had at least a little shred of the excitement of a scientific experiment, of probing the unknown,” Kahn said.

After graduating from the University of Connecticut, Kahn worked in the machine shop of the Exploratorium in San Francisco tinkering with different materials and ideas. One piece that made it to the Exploratorium floor involved an angled metal disc covered in crushed garnet and glass beads, which could be spun by hand. The combination of gravity and the movement of the disc caused the mixture to shift and reorganize in fluid-like patterns that Kahn didn’t have control over.

“I was intrigued with the fact that I didn’t really sculpt it. The dynamics of the system actually did the sculpting for me. The resulting patterns were much more interesting than anything I would have come up with on my own,” Kahn said.

Kahn’s work at the Exploratorium attracted the attention of physicist Sid Nagel who was studying what he called the granular state of matter, and from which Kahn took the title for his lecture. Nagel was attempting to explain the behavior of collections of small particles, like sand, that wasn’t explained by the traditional four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Granular matter is solid, but acts like a liquid in how it forms patterns. Many of Kahn’s works showed Nagel’s principles in action, and the two struck up a friendship.

A reoccurring theme of Kahn’s work, which he discussed in the lecture, is making invisible parts of nature visible. For the Duales Systems Pavillion in Germany, Kahn used large wind turbines to create a vortex of water vapor seven stories high inside the building. From a spiral staircase hugging the walls of the pavilion, the surging water vapor shows the turbulence and changing air currents that rise through the building. The project cost $10 million and the pavilion only stood for six months.

In Charlotte, N.C., Kahn covered one side of a parking garage with three acres of aluminum panels similar to the AT&T building. The installation is big enough to see gusts of wind pass by as light reflects off of the moving panels.

One of the stories that Kahn told during the lecture took place during the installation process of the piece on the AT&T building. A man ran over to the hard-hat wearing Kahn and his helper as they looked up to the building from a nearby street corner and asked if they were repair men for the giant screen on the side of the building, convinced that it was a high tech piece of advertising equipment, and tried to convince them to leave it broken because it looked better.

“Digital imagery and high tech billboards are such a common thing, but this thing is kind of the opposite: it’s just a bunch of hinges. It’s something someone could have made 100 years ago. People think of it as a digital thing, but digital things are on and off and this thing is not on/off. There are a million settings. That’s part of the complexity,” Kahn said.

Kahn’s piece the “Encircled Void” is on currently on display on the third floor of Bertolini Student Center.

For more information, pictures and video, visit http://nedkahn.com.