Jennifer Steinkamp's computer animations fill galleries of San Jose Museum of Art with fields of color

By Michael S. Gant

A VISIT to the rooms of living light that Southern California computer artist Jennifer Steinkamp creates can be deceiving and disorienting. A quick glance at a piece like Rapunzel, and one might mistake it for an especially crystalline flower print blown up to wall size—a page from a modern herbal maybe.

But look longer, and this delicate tangle of straw flowers turns into a flowing, twisting kinetic mass of whipping blossoms. The piece, projected from across the gallery, is a computerized animation running on a brief cycle that refreshes every few minutes, although the motion of the scores of intertwined stems produces such a complex dance that you can't really pinpoint the repetition.