Karen Guzak : Public Art Commissions : Southern Oregon State College
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Karen Guzak
OVERLAKE TRANSIT CENTER

Library exterior
COMMUNITY COLLEGE LIBRARY

RAILING DETAIL
COUNCIL CHAMBERS RAILING

DETAIL
SEATAC AIRPORT ELEVATORS

Computing Services Building at
Southern Oregon State College, 1991
EXTERIOR WALL DETAIL
DETAIL: CHAO TO ORDER: A COMPUTER MODEL, 1991
MEDIUM: ALUMINUM, BRONZE, AUTO BODY ENAMEL, LED'S, PLEXIGLAS, INDUSTRIAL OBJECTS

In 1991, I had the opportunity to design and install a 1% for Art project at the Computing Services Building at Southern Oregon State College. The wall sculpture was created in collaboration with my son, Chris Guzak, a Windows developer at Microsoft.
We decided to play up the use of the building, as well as the existing architecture, and designed a fantasy model of a computer using symbolic language from both engineering and the arts.

EXTERIOR WALL VIEW

This piece is a 65’ long indoor/outdoor wall sculpture of metal, enamel, Plexiglas and LED’s titled, “Chaos to Order: A Computer Model.”

It begins on the outside of the building with a black and white “particle field” of “electrons.” Through visual metaphors, the field is organized into waves, bits, then bytes and coded and connected. The connecting lines travel around the corner, adding color along the way, and jump through the entry doors to an inside wall. There is a collage of pieces that represent computer parts such as integrated circuits, drivers, control and memory units, keyboard, mouse, etc.

The final piece of the wall sculpture is an eight foot square, very colorful computer drawn cross-word puzzle of words, numbers, and visual symbols back-lit with 640 preprogrammed, red LED’s [thanks to Bob Teeple for his design and fabrication assistance].

INTERIOR WALL VIEW

::: ©1999-2006 Karen Guzak :::