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Exhibits by Collection
Browse exhibits by exhibition, guide, or research project.
This exhibition invited visitors to explore a special collection about scale and structure.
Both an exhibit development endeavor and a visitor research study, the APE project explored strategies and tactics to shift the role of visitors from passive recipients of information to active participants in the STEM learning experience.
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.
It all happens at the edge—so went the theme of this eclectic and cross-disciplinary exhibition exploring the dynamics of all natural and human-made boundaries found in science, engineering, and society.
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.
Colorfest was a two-month extravaganza celebrating color at the museum in the sumer of 2011.
These exhibits are designed to engage visitors in mathematical thinking and concepts.
Cybernetic Serendipity exhibited the creative use of computers for visual art, music, dance and interactive experiences. It was groundbreaking and received much acclaim in Europe and then again in the United States when it was shown at the Corcoran in 1969, and later at the Exploratorium, opening October 17, 1969 (the first year that the Exploratorium was open).
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.
Diving Into the Gene Pool, a major, multifaceted 1995 exhibition explored genetics and the Human Genome Project from a variety of perspectives.
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.
This web exhibition investigated the San Andreas fault and the 1906 and 1989 northern California earthquakes. Live data, quake basics, damage mitigation, podcasts, webcasts, photos, illustrations, activities, and more are all available on this site.
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 exhibition/festival contained a number of historical tools and maps used for exploring and sizing up the Earth and took a global look at the complex topic of how we find our way in the world. It was the largest themed exhibition ever staged by the Exploratorium.
This traveling exhibition developed by the Exploratorium explored the geometry of seeing, moving, and fitting things together.
The Listen collection opened to the public in 2006. It featured a new permanent collection of interactive, ears-on exhibits.
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.
Memory, a major exhibition at the Exploratorium included more than 40 new exhibits grouped into 6 broad areas that guided visitors through the labyrinth of memory from personal, social, cultural, psychological, and neurological perspectives.
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.
The Mind exhibit collection showcased over 40 exhibits about thinking and feeling. Working with expert advisors, the Mind team spent over four years researching the cognitive sciences to create provocative and compelling experiences that illuminate the way your mind works. Explore the inner workings of the mind through this collection of exhibits from the Mind team.
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)
The Exploratorium’s location on a major civic promenade has inspired Over the Water, a program of large-scale, often temporary, commisioned artworks for the museum's dynamic site on the edge of the city and the Bay.
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.
Pictures have always played an important role in the scientific process, especially in the history of anatomy. Whether woodcut, sketch, sculpture, X-ray, or MRI, visual images have helped us observe, describe, model, categorize, analyze, and conceptualize the human body. How has this imagery changed the way we look at our bodies? The Exploratorium invited visitors to delve into this provocative question with Revealing Bodies exhibition that ran in 2000.
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.
During the summer of 2002, after more than three years of research and experimentation, the Exploratorium’s revitalized collection of exhibits on visual perception officially opened to the public. Seeing showcased classic exhibits as well as new visual experiences created especially for this exhibition.
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.
At San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza, people come together to explore sound, changing the tenor of this public space.
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.
In creating this traveling exhibition at the Exploratorium, the artists, scientists and exhibition creators were inspired by poetry, writing, other artworks, but primarily the patterns created by natural forces.
The Exploratorium continues to create the world’s best interactive exhibits for young children and their families, exhibits that encourage continued exploration, social interaction, and whimsical play. This curated collection of exhibits allows parents and children to co-investigate the world around them.
