This Moment in Time: A Celebration of Ephemerality

At the beginning of the fall term, the Caltech Pond Bridge was transformed by artist Lita Albuquerque into a gold foil installation — the largest she has made to date — dubbed This Moment in Time. It’s part of a larger art exhibit at Caltech called Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech. ****Presented as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide program, Crossing Over spans six distinct indoor and outdoor venues on Caltech’s campus, featuring an array of scientific drawings, paintings, photographs, films, instruments, molecular models, and rare archival materials from the histories of Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The exhibits are only here until December 15th, so make sure to go and visit them before winter break!

Apparently, some people couldn’t wait until December 15th to walk over the bridge, which has been gradually sullied with footprints over the course of the term. This came as somewhat of a disappointment to Albuquerque.

“I guess people aren’t used to seeing art in this kind of setting,” she remarked during an interview with the Tech. “It [being an inconvenience] was certainly something I thought about, but I hoped that people would see the beauty and walk around it. But how do people actually respond to such annoyances? Not with a ton of care, it seems.”

While not intended to be an inconvenience, Albuquerque reflected that “in a way, [the bridge] calls for people to interact with it — human intervention.” She had hoped that the human intervention could be more controlled. “Once it’s uncontrolled, it’s something else. It’s still interesting, but not the original intention.”

Even so, Albuquerque remains very pleased with how the exhibit turned out.

“Every time you see it, it’s another ‘moment in time.’”

From the Exhibit Plaque:

Lita Albuquerque’s installation This Moment in Time commemorates the first exhibition of her work at Caltech’s Baxter Art Gallery in 1974. Her use of artificial gold leaf refers to the origin of gold and other elements through stellar nucleosynthesis, a process first theorized in 1946 by astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and later refined by Caltech physicist William Fowler (1911-1995) in collaboration with Hoyle and Margaret (1919-2020) and Geoffrey Burbidge (1925-2010). Their landmark 1957 paper “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars” (also known as “B2FH” for the initials of its authors) provided compelling theoretical and experimental evidence that nearly all the chemical elements in the universe originated in nuclear fusion reactions within stars. This was the finding that later prompted astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) to famously exclaim that “we are made of star stuff.” This Moment in Time by Lita Albuquerque. Photo Credit: Chris Hanke, Michael Gutierrez