Exhibits by Collection

Since its inception in 1974, the Exploratorium’s Artist-in-Residence Program (AIR) has grown to include hundreds of artists and performers. The museum works with individuals and artist groups who are drawn to collaboration, interested in interdisciplinary dialogue, and open to developing new working methods. Projects have taken countless forms, such as multimedia performances, theatrical productions, animated filmmaking, immersive installations, walking tours, and online projects.

Cells to Self considers the incredible diversity of cell form and function, from the environmental awareness of bacteria to human heart cells beating in response to electricity. Through microscopes, digital models, and first-hand interactions with cells, visitors can explore how cells move, divide, communicate, and respond to their surroundings.

We’re developing new exhibits for the Cells to Self collection, expected to open in 2019. Until then, you might notice us experimenting with prototype exhibits in the East Gallery Corridor.

These exhibits are designed to engage visitors in mathematical thinking and concepts.

This exhibition was part of a series of shows themed Patterns of Change. From life cycles to bicycles to orbital cycles and more, the show focused on the cycles that are all around us, in both expected and unexpected places.

Explainers are stationed throughout the Exploratorium doing structured and open-ended demonstrations. For example, Explainers dissect cow eyes, perform magic tricks, explore marine life, and engage visitors in philosophical discussions. Ask an orange-vested Explainer to help you explore.

Chaperone guides help focus students' explorations and connect their experiences to the Next Generation Science Standards. They don’t require students to use paper and pencil; the chaperones will document the students' experiences.

This traveling exhibition developed by the Exploratorium explored the geometry of seeing, moving, and fitting things together.

Living Liquid aims to discover how to design exhibits that allow visitors explore and ask questions about scientific datasets, through interactive data visualizations about marine life.

This collection of interactive exhibits (installed at one of the entrances to San Francisco Public Library’s main branch, across from City Hall) gets passersby to ponder about how we think, feel, and behave in relation to other people.

At this site, our first major outdoors installation, the exhibits encouraged visitors to become expert noticers of the natural and built world.

(Exhibits deinstalled July 2015)

Reflections, a special exhibition in 2009, invited visitors to explore the scientific and cultural history of mirrors—one of humankind’s most influential and intimate technologies—with activities and special events. Mirrors have played fundamental roles in science and inspired countless creative explorations of their poetic and psychological qualities.

Are you competitive? Do you like to negotiate? How do you make decisions about sharing, helping, and collaborating with others? And how do scientists study these kinds of social interactions? Questions like these are at the heart of the Exploratorium’s Science of Sharing exhibition. We’ve designed exhibits and activities to let you experiment with social interactions, play with strategies for working with others, and learn about the scientific study of human behavior.

Seeing the Light was a participatory science laboratory that invited visitors to experiment with interference patterns and optics, resonances and reflections, lasers and illusions. IBM commissioned the Exploratorium to create the exhibit in 1984. It was originally shown in the IBM Gallery of Science and Art in Manhattan and the collection was then given to the New York Hall of Science.

What are the essential elements of life? How can you distinguish between the living and nonliving world? Explore these questions and more at the Exploratorium’s Life Science collection. After years of research and development, Traits of Life opened in 2002, featuring over 30 new and revitalized biology exhibits and demonstrations. The collection examines the fundamental elements common to all living things.