FREDERICK JOHN KIESLER

This exhibition is a concise yet rich examination of Frederick John Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. Two of Kiesler’s most essential and ambitious projects developed at the Laboratory are explored in this exhibition: the Mobile Home Library, a device proposed to radically alter domestic space, and the Vision Machine, an ambitious apparatus intended to visualize human sight—from optics and nerve stimuli to dream content and dream images. A selection of approximately 100 drawings, photographs, and research studies of these projects, as well as the never before realized construction of Kiesler’s Mobile Home Library, will illuminate his remarkable attempts to grasp human vision, record dreams, and to correlate libraries, information, images, and consciousness.