A dreary piece of infrastructure in San Antonio, Texas recently became a pop-up cultural destination when artists Joe O’Connell and Blessing Hancock installed a series of six, orb-like chandeliers below a cement underpass. “Ballroom Luminoso,” as the project is called, illuminates the typically unfrequented space with colored LED lights filtered through a spherical cage of recycled bicycle parks and custom-cut steel, casting silhouettes that speak of the area’s history as well as its progressive future. Click through for more.

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Figolu, 2005–11. Photo: Jerry L. Thompson/Courtesy of Storm King Art Center

We’re closer than we’ve ever been (and now we’re even closer!) to the SFMOMA expansion, which will break ground on May 29. The official last day to appreciate the Mario Botta building’s intactness is June 2, at the close of a four-day countdown celebration with free admission for everyone.

To kick off its series of off-site programming, which must carry SFMOMA (and the rest of us) through early 2016, the museum fittingly went with something monumental. Director Neal Benezra organized a retrospective of Mark di Suvero’s large-scale steel sculptures at Crissy Field, a former airfield on the waterfront near the city’s Marina district. The show doesn’t officially open until Wednesday, but joggers and pedestrians will be forgiven for noticing the eight enormous steel assemblages hulking over their usual dog-walking routes. Read more!

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Image courtesy of ISHKY

For all you architecture buffs, Pi Day might conjure visions of the Guggenheim Museum, the Apple spaceship, and much of Oscar Niemeyer’s oeuvre—all pi shoo-ins. (For those who need a math refresher: Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter.) But 3/14 is also a great occasion for celebrating the number’s infinite string of digits with parades, skywriting, and, yes, pie. As part of last fall’s ZERO1 Biennial in Silicon Valley, the artist ISHKY commanded a team of five synchronized aircraft to skywrite the digits of pi in a loop around San Francisco Bay. Flying at 10,000 feet, the fleet puffed out the beloved ratio, dot-matrix style, in numbers spanning a quarter of a mile in height. Find the circumference after the jump!

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An animated rendering of The Bay Lights.

On Thursday night the light sculptor and programmer extraordinaire Leo Villareal took to the stage at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco to explain how he turned the Bay Bridge into a work of digital art. Forty-eight hours earlier the artist had launched The Bay Lights, a massive LED installation running 1.8 miles across the western span of the bridge. With 25,000 white LEDs affixed to about five miles of vertical cabling, The Bay Lights has been called the largest light sculpture in the world. Read more!

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When the switch gets flipped on March 5, powering on 25,000 LEDs strung over the vertical cables of the Bay Bridge, The Bay Lights will be the largest light sculpture in the world, spanning 1.8 miles. It will also be the longest. That’s because the artist behind the installation, Leo Villareal, built custom software that will choreograph the LEDs according to an unrepeating sequence which will play over the project’s two-year span. From sunset until 2:00 a.m., Villareal’s dancing, flickering bridge will illuminate the sky every night into 2014. See the animated rendering!

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As a sophisticated biological network, coral reefs are natural spies. Reefs consist of hundreds (or even hundreds of thousands) of polyps, which gather information about their environments and use it to shape their growth patterns and, consequently, the form of the reef itself. In a way, their structures are a product of their surveillance of the environment. So when the San Francisco–based BIOS Design Collective wanted to render Silicon Valley’s invisible web of data—from overlapping wi-fi signals to the behavior trackers buried in web pages—as a physical expression of eyes and brains, they chose the coral reef as their ruling metaphor. Read more!

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By Danielle Rago

New York’s Madison Square Park has hosted all sorts of funky art installations, from Roxy Paine’s fighting stainless steel trees to Charles Long’s brightly colored, blob-shaped “sound sculptures.” But its latest display, by New York City-based artist Leo Villareal, is its trippiest yet.

The “Buckyball,” named after the American architect, engineer, designer, and inventor Buckminster Fuller (natch), is a 30-foot, three-dimensional, neon-lit geodesic sculpture set atop a metal plinth. Designed as part of the Madison Square Park Art program, the glow-in-the-dark statue is on view through February 1, 2013. Read more!

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Ever wanted to sneak away and pop into a movie theatre in the middle of the day? Well, now you can at the Centipede Cinema in Guimaraes, Portugal, an UNESCO Heritage site that has emerged as a center for art and design. This awesome installation, built in honor of  the city’s designation as the 2012 European Capital of Culture, consists of 16 tubes that funnel into an enclosed screening room. Film fans need only to stick their heads into one of the yellow tubes to get swept up in a cinematic adventure. A collaboration between Barlett School of Architecture professor Colin Fournier, artist Marysia Lewandowska, and London firm NEON, this one-of-a-kind movie experience is only open for a week, so you better hurry! Read more.

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The British artist, inventor, and general wonderment-maker Luke Jerram unveiled a new kinetic sculpture today at the U.K. research and lab hub Bristol and Bath Science Park. Jerram has been serenading city dwellers the world over through his public art projects, from the traveling Play Me, I’m Yours pianos planted in public squares to the floating Sky Orchestra, which performs from hot-air balloons tricked out with speakers.

The artist’s new sculpture is more meditative than his public-art pieces, but it’s still musical. Measuring just over 16 feet tall, the work—the latest entry in Jerram’s chandelier series—consists of hundreds of glass bulbs that sparkle and flicker, speeding up and slowing down according to the presence of sunlight. So how does it work? Read more.

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These days telephone booths are pretty much obsolete. Instead of letting them slowly decay on the city sidewalks, an artist collaborative called Kingyobu in Osaka is converting them into giant goldfish aquariums. The shimmery orange fish is somewhat of a good luck charm in Japan, so visitors crowd around the awesome tanks and get their luck and happiness fill. Read More.

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