“It was wonderful. It was like being in a whole other dimension of peace and serenity and connected to whence we came and maybe to whence we return," Jill Lord, a visitor to NINFEO says.
Sandy Hausman, Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief, paid a visit to the Contemplative Sciences Center's NINFEO and Conservatory installations. While there, she spoke to community members who happened to be viewing the pieces, Jill Lord and Vicki Newman.
“The delicacy of the drawing and the etching within the tiles was pretty remarkable knowing how it was formed with his larger studio of technologists and architects and artists. It’s pretty impressive," Newman concludes.
The group headed to the building's 4th floor to the work to experience the work in the Conservatory, a highly programmable space for sound and light.
The space houses rotating works by Music professor Matthew Burtner and serves as a research environment at other times, simply by changing what is projected into the room. It is now being used to study how different environments affect meditation.
For the current exhibit, "Contemplative Listening in Sonic Immersion," seven of Burtner's graduate students created art from sound and light.
Of one of the pieces, Lawton Hall's, "Frogs and Toads of North America," Burtner says, “It puts the lights into different parts of the room as each frog is introduced, and the sound comes from that place, but then – of course – it morphs into stranger and stranger realms of frogs and toads. There are some that take place into the far future, in a black hole."