Ken Goldberg’s ReBloom: Reno turns live seismic data into art

The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno is presenting "ReBloom: Reno" in its Thomas Lee Bottom Gallery on the second floor from 10 October 2026 to 7 February 2027. The site-specific work is by the Bay Area artist Ken Goldberg, made in collaboration with Kabir Shah, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg.

The installation draws on live data from the NN.JVTV.HNZ seismometer on the University of Nevada, Reno campus and turns the Earth's constant motion into ever-changing circular blooms of colour that recall fields of flowers. Shown as a live-feed projection, it is described by the museum as an internet-based artwork that pairs the palette of familiar landscape paintings with live seismic data.

That palette comes from five landscape paintings in the museum's permanent collection, by Chester Arnold, Sandow Birk, Maynard Dixon, Jean LaMarr and Phyllis Shafer. Works reproduced alongside the project include LaMarr's "Going Back to the Rez" (1974), Arnold's "Fin du Siecle" (1992) and Dixon's "Edge of the Amargosa Desert" (1927). By linking these interpretations of the land to real-time geological activity, the museum says, the work connects viewers to the forces that shape the environment, offering an immersive and unpredictable meditation on fragility, change and the endurance of the natural world.

Goldberg, an artist, roboticist and filmmaker, is Professor of Engineering and Art Practice at UC Berkeley and founding director of Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium. His other collaborative projects include a garden tended by a robot directed by public participation, and an animation of a robotic industrial arm performing the everyday acts of essential workers, such as cleaning and caring.

He will discuss translating earthquakes into art in an Art Bite talk, "The Collision of Art and Data", at the museum on 16 October 2026 from 12 to 1 pm.