MIT List Visual Arts Center

Otto Piene’s “Lichtballett’’ or “Light Ballet’’ installation at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

MIT List Visual Arts Center

A black box inside the room emits light from a rotating source within.

MIT List Visual Arts Center

At the piece’s zenith, as it were, the room is filled with light from multiple sources, creating the sense that one has been thrust into the center of a boxed-in Milky Way - or a very trippy disco.

MIT List Visual Arts Center

In between, effects of projected light that now resemble tumbleweed, now mysterious deep sea creatures, and now shuttlecocks slowly creep and fan across the room.

Otto Piene

That exhibition also featured a sculpture “Electric Rose,’’ an aluminum sphere on a stand (like a rose on a stem) covered with spike-like neon bulbs that light up in sequenced phases.

MIT List Visual Arts Center

The patterns come and go according to rhythms of their own, but they also work together in unison.

MIT List Visual Arts Center

Piene first started projecting light from torches and hand-operated lamps through perforated stencils in 1959.

MIT List Visual Arts Center

Inspired in part by the light-and-shadow-play of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic sculptures from three decades earlier, Piene expanded and honed his “light ballets.’’

Otto Piene

The first US showing of “Light Ballet’’ was in 1965 at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery.

Otto Piene

The most beautiful room at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Dietmar Lohrl

Otto Piene at the ZERO retrospective displayed at Muse Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp, Belgium in 1979.