Commissioned for an installation art piece for the lobby of the Institute for Data Science and Computing suite in the Gables One Tower, artist Patricia Van Dalen was given the disassembled pieces of the University’s first supercomputer, Pegasus, to work with.

Using the motherboards, cables, chips, lights, memory cards, processors, connectors, and integrated circuits, Van Dalen interwove plastic cords into the boards in a variety of bright colors representing the wide range of topics interconnected through computation. As an abstraction of interdisciplinarity powered by computational science, the cords composed a tactile and visual web of pathways between topics like biological science, engineering, music, art, architecture, law, the atmosphere, oceans, and climate.

“The boards remind me of fictional universes—strange indecipherable landscapes where language is reduced to sequences of zeros and ones,” revealed Van Dalen. “Within the family of experimental installations that I have been developing for over two decades, this piece furthers a line of thought that has transited from artwork to artwork, until its arrival at this current representation, translating my artistic appreciation for the universe of computers—the powerful machinery that invites us to explore new pathways of science and art.”

Data Hall, August 2014
Vinyl, metal, and fiberglass
28″ x 192″

About Patricia van Dalen

Artist Patricia Van Dalen @PvanDalen was born in Maracaibo, in western Venezuela to a Dutch father and a Venezuelan mother. She lived her first years in Maracaibo and then moved with her family to Holland. In 1962, they moved back to Venezuela to live in Caracas. Van Dalen studied at the Neumann Institute Of Design (Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann-INCE), in Caracas, where she graduated in 1977 as a graphic designer. Intermittently between 1980 and 1986, she trained and lived in Paris, while she worked with the kinetic artist Yaacov Agam in the Visual Education Method for pre-school children.  Most of her artistic career was developed in Caracas, Venezuela, where she is recognized as a preeminent artist. Van Dalen currently resides and works in Miami.