'Leticia Bajuyo: Event Horizon'

Detail from Entropy, by Leticia Bajuyo

'Leticia Bajuyo: Event Horizon'

Right now, the interior of Women & Their Work holds an enormous two-part sculpture called Event Horizon by Leticia Bajuyo, and, as with much good art in this world, the gorgeous photos don't half do it justice. A visit to see this new work – in a location convenient to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, just a couple blocks from that Dog & Duck Pub – will give you something interesting to talk about, especially when you can recall: I was right there in the room with it, and I played both of the attached theremins.

Bajuyo's installation comprises a huge, stretched-out cornucopia – a sort of funnel, a bright shimmering wormhole made from hundreds and hundreds of carefully tied-together compact discs – and its mirrored twin on the other side of the room. Each of the two weird funnels terminates in a working theremin – that chimerical intersection of science and music redolent of Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations."

The gallery describes an earlier work – Entropy, on which Event Horizon is directly based – with this: "The installation ... is focused on the CD as unwanted information that is being sucked into an endless vortex ... The vortex is made of the shiny side of the discs that hold information. The other side of the vortex reveals how the form is made and displays the text information on each CD such as band names and software titles."

Well, precisely, yes. But to actually walk between the static and sculptural vortices of Event Horizon offers an experience that seems otherworldly and beyond the reach of language's articulate hands. It made perfect sense that one of the joined CDs snagging my sight was for Robyn and Rand Miller's Riven, the sequel to the interactive ur-virtuality of their Myst. The W&TW gallery seems unreal in just that way now, like a chamber in some vast computer-generated simulacrum, a real-world installation transplanted from an artier region of Second Life in its heyday.

You should go there. Step briefly inside the cool air-conditioning of the gallery, walk in wonder between the shiny room-sized wormholes of recorded data, and make those theremins wail. Your hot Texas afternoon will seem worlds away. –