Ken Goldberg Brings The Outside World Indoors

Bio: Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of robotics at UC Berkeley. He applies new technologies to explore the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. His previous works include the Telegarden, a live garden tended by a robot that was remotely controlled by more than 100,000 people over the internet and a one-millionth-scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater etched in silicon. In 2023, with roboticist and dancer Catie Cuan, he developed an eight-hour performance with an industrial robot arm tracing the motions of essential workers, which was performed at National Sawdust in Brooklyn and the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

With artist Tiffany Shlain, he created an exhibition for the Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide in 2024, drawing on the Los Angeles landscape, tree-ring dating, and artificial intelligence. An expanded version opened at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in SF in 2026. His work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, ZKM and the ICC in Tokyo and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and BAMPFA. He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering and is the founding director of Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium.

Title of work: ReBloom: Reno (2026)

Where to see it:  ReBloom: Reno is on view through February 7, 2027 at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 West Liberty, Reno, Nevada 89501.

Three words to describe this work:  Earth, color, time.

What was on your mind at the time: I was thinking about the history of landscape painting and how to bring the outside environment inside the museum.

An interesting feature that’s not immediately noticeable: The colors of each band in the circular “blooms,” triggered by nearby changes in the earth’s motion, are sampled from five landscape paintings in the Nevada Museum’s collection by Chester Arnold, Sandow Birk, Maynard Dixon, Jean LaMarr, and Phyllis Shafer. The original paintings are on display at the entrance to the installation.

How the work reflects your practice as a whole: In 1959, C.P. Snow wrote about “the Two Cultures,” science and the humanities, that rarely talk to each other. I’ve spent my career working in both, as a roboticist and as an artist. I’m a humanist at heart, and often critical of the technology I work with. ReBloom: Reno is the latest in a series of seismic works I began in 1997. It acknowledges five Nevada landscapes and runs on live seismic data, using technology to bring us closer to something alive and beyond our control.

One song that captures the work’s essence: “I Feel The Earth Move” by Carol King.