Take an audio tour of a 2022-23 exhibition at The Peale, Baltimore's Community Museum! Listen to artist Lee Boot chat about his show "Lee Boot: Abstracts & Artifacts," on view at The Peale from November 2022-January 2023. You can see videos and interact with more media files using Smartify, the ultimate cultural travel app! Includes 21 narrated stops.

Lee Boot (00:00): So last, but certainly not least in this exhibition is the dome Explorer piece. You should be standing in front of, there should be an iPad on a little a little pedestal, little mini table therewith a monitor over the top that just makes it easier for the people around you to see what you're seeing on the iPad if you choose to work with this with this piece. So, it's called, this piece is called Dome Explorer because again, the National Academy of Sciences commissioned me, commissioned our lab to build an iPad app that would explain the different icons painted on the ceiling of the National Academy of Science's Great Hall at their headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington dc. See, the thing is, when you walk into this space, it's this beautiful, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a temple to science, right?

(00:58): There's this beautiful painted ceiling, 60 feet above you, but most people don't know what the icons mean and they're really far away. And so, we built this app so that people could click on these icons and see what they are supposed to represent. But we did this project in two phases. The first phase was what I just described. Um, and if you pick up the iPad, it should have this project on it. We're not giving you a lot of instructions, because it doesn't take a lot of instructions. You just hit enter. Or if you're already looking at a ceiling you can kind of swipe around and see different parts of it or move the iPad around if it's in that mode and use it like augmented reality. See the, see this room as if you're looking at the dome of the National Academy of Sciences.

(01:51): The second phase happens when you click on the blue ball in the middle of that painted gold colored ceiling. When you click on that ball, you will see this tree-like form emerge and kind of like all hell break loose. What does this mean? Well, after we did the first phase, the National Academy really liked it and they asked us to do a second phase describing what, how science has changed since the National Academy's Building opened in 1924. So, J.D. Talasek, director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences who also worked with us on the SEE Intuit program. Um, he commissioned both the first and second phase of the Dome Explorer piece. And he and I went around the country interviewing some of the greatest living scientists. People like Craig Ventor, who cracked the human genome, and Robert Lefkowitz, who discovered how the GT G protein receptor works, which makes, you know, antihistamines work.

(03:01): Just brilliant people who had done groundbreaking work and getting their take on what science was like. And if you explore the kind of crazy landscape that you will see once you click on that blue ball and this iPad app, you can click on the little geometric shapes, the triangles, and the circles, and you can see some of the things that they had to say. And I'm going to tell you right now that this is, this was a fascinating process for us because of what these often Nobel Laureates had to say. I guess once you get that much notoriety, you kind of say whatever you want. And they were, they were actually very critical of the way science proceeds. So incrementally, so many too many scientists in their view are not engaged in taking big risks. They think that the federal agencies are not taking enough risks.

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