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After Hours: Soundwaves
Wednesday | November 20, 2019 | 5:00 pm–8:30 pm
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Activities free with gallery admission. Planetarium ticket fees apply.
Enjoy an evening at the museum! Curate your night from a host of activities, including sketching in the galleries, art-making activities, a show in the Whitney and Elizabeth MacMillan Planetarium, and stargazing on the Ruth and John Huss Observation Deck (weather permitting).
Sketching theme: Draw from a collection of critters that are known for making sounds like frogs, birds and cicadas.
Hands-on activity: Play with toys that focus on sounds and waves.
Diorama Tours
Tours begin in Horizon Hall at 6:15 and 7:15 pm.
Dive deep into the dioramas with ecologist Daniel Stanton from the College of Biological Sciences. Learn about how our native plants defend themselves against predators, amazing adaptations, and Minnesota’s biodiversity—and threats to it.
Special Guests
Environmental Futurisms: Sound, Technology, and Imagination
Michael Wilson, a 2019-20 showcase artist, records sounds in nature and mixes them in his work. His award-winning 2017 audio work, Elcrys, imagines a future in which elk have not been seen in nearly a generation, and scientists attempt to lure the last known herd of elk down out of the mountains with cybernetic replications of elk calls. Here sound is central to humanity’s last, desperate effort to make contact with a species at the edge.
At After Hours: Soundwaves, Wilson will have his equipment set up in Horizon Hall to help guests arrange and sculpt natural sound, using sound design tools to manifest possible future environmental realities. Add effects to different sounds, change their pitches, and more, to help create a “Bell composition” with your audio experiments.
Oggy Ilic, Ph.D., from the University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, will be doing a demonstration that focuses ultrasound to levitate objects in mid-air!