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Bob Miller A Brief Resume
Birth: Niagara Falls, New York 1935
Military Service:
U.S. Army
Education:
Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio
Experience:
Computer Programmer
Merchant Marine
Self-employed
The Exploratorium
Self-employed
I helped Frank Oppenheimer develop, from scratch, a unique museum-the Exploratorium in San Francisco. While I was there full time from 1970-1988, I conceived, prototyped, designed and built several dozen exhibits, had the responsibility for a wide variety of activities, and served as Associate Director for 10 years. I was also Chairman of the Executive council which was the governing body for two years while the Board of Directors looked for a new director after Frank Oppenheimer's death. I discovered and developed a way of thinking about light and vision that has astounded physicists, enlightened teachers, entertained lay people, delighted children and led to the possibility of extracting from a photograph an image of what was behind the camera when the picture was taken. I invented and developed a method for painting with light, was granted a U.S. patent for such a device and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to build my first Sun Painting. I conceived and created more than a dozen light sculptures, copies of which are on permanent display in Barcelona, Caracas, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo, Zurich, and other sites. I developed and presented a unique lecture/demonstration about light and vision at a wide variety of schools and science museums, including Parc de la Villette, Paris; Singapore Science Center; The Petronas Science Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and at other sites including the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco; and the Psychology Department of the Graduate School of the University of California at Santa Cruz. I conceived and curated an exhibition about memory that completed a four-year tour of the U.S. This show was also displayed at the Medici Palace in Florence, Italy, and was the topic of an article by Oliver Sacks that appeared in the New Yorker magazine. I was a Senior Programmer for IBM for three years, and was a computer programmer for three years at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. I went to sea for two years, most memorably to Vietnam during the war, more pacifically to Antarctica on an oceanographic ship that was funded by the National Science Foundation, and to the South Pacific on a NASA tracking ship for the Apollo moon shots. I spent three months in India and made a 1,000-mile bicycle trip from Calcutta to New Delhi. I was offered a full-tuition scholarship to MIT which I did not accept, I was honorably discharged after two years in the U.S. Army and received a Bachelor's Degree in GeneraI Science from Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio, where I was student body president and graduated with a 3.8 gpa. Articles about and/or photographs of my work have appeared in a wide variety of publications including the American Educator, Discover, Encyclopedia Britannica 1984 Yearbook of Science and the Future, The London Times, Look, the New York Times, OMNI, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and the Tokyo Asahi-Shimbun. In 1980 W. E. Disney Enterprises asked me to help develop a light pavilion for EPCOT and Tokyo Disneyland. I declined the offer because of my passion for, dedication to, and respect for Frank Oppenheimer's Exploratorium, where I stayed on to continue to help develop the museum. I am currently self employed as an artist, inventor, science museum consultant and lecturer (light and vision). |
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