skygrazer.com

I came across this article, Weird Science Makes Wonderful Art about a teleidoscope as public art.

It’s a telescope. No, it’s a kaleidoscope. No, it’s both — a teleidoscope.

Local artist Gregg Payne created the teleidoscope from scrap metal, including a four-foot piece of copper pipe, stainless steel couplings and an iron base that used to be a giant belt wheel.

Out of scrap, a beautiful piece of art arose, and out of the scope, beautiful pieces of art arise.

The teleidoscope will become a piece of public art to beautify Park Avenue in Chico and it will produce photography used as art in a number of places, including the Jesus Center and the Butte Art and Design Digital Outdoor Gallery, along Second Street.

Payne explained that he started with a design for the piece about a year ago, and with funding from Rory Rottschalk, of Culp and Tanner Engineering, he ordered the lens — a sphere of leaded crystal from Austria — and had three 4-foot stainless steel mirrors cut.

Looking through the scope provides a fragmented, reflected and symmetrically replicated view.

But unlike common, hand-held kaleidoscopes that viewers hold up to one eye, the six-inch viewing end of the teleidoscope allows the viewer to use both eyes, rendering a three-dimensional image.

The scope can be swiveled and rotated to follow moving objects or to focus on any particular object, creating beauty out of ordinary objects.
“I always wanted to do more interactive and optical projects,” Payne said.

I came across this article about an exhibit which included a video kaleidoscope.

Ara Peterson and Jim Drain’s “Large Video Kaleidoscope” (2003-06) looks like the most direct remembrance of Turrell here. It opens a hole in the wall through which angled mirrors multiply the changing light, colors and figures of an abstract video projection.

And here’s an article about kaleidoscope artist Jerry Farnsworth.

Farnsworth exhibited and sold wooden toys and kaleidoscopes in several imaginative designs.

He said he has been making wooden toys for 26 years and began adding kaleidoscopes 16 years ago.

“I wanted to do something more difficult,” he said.

The kaleidoscopes allow him to create not only the outside of a piece, but the inside as well. He said the mirrors used to create each kaleidoscope must be fixed at an exact angle, although several combinations of angles are possible.

“You have to arrange them in the exact position to get what you want,” he said.

The kaleidoscopes for sale Saturday ranged from a small wooden heart necklace with a kaleidoscope inside to a crab, a car, a camera and other designs. Farnsworth also has more traditional-looking rectangular kaleidoscopes.

He said he began creating all the different shapes and sizes to make something unique. “I started making my niche in the business by making something you wouldn’t be expecting in a kaleidoscope,” he said.

He said he even has kaleidoscopes that four people can all look into at the same time.

“Anything in the world can have a kaleidoscope in it or pointed at it,” Farnsworth said.