The latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, presents "Celestial Garden," a new light and sound installation in Yale Schwarzman Center, news of new fiction from senior lecturer Cynthia Zarin, and student leadership opportunities with the Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Also in this edition: a call for submissions from The Yale Review, a special mentorship opportunity for a Ph.D. student in history of art, and a journalism symposium for incarcerated persons led by Yale scholars.
For more, please visit an archive of all arts and humanities coverage at Yale News.
An installation of light and sound
Yale Schwarzman Center kicked off its fall 2025 programming season with a 360-degree, immersive light and sound installation created by New York City-based artist and Yale alum Leo Villareal '90.
Called "Celestial Garden," the installation's ever-changing imagery illuminates the rounded vault of The Dome, on the center's third floor, using 10 projectors controlled by a computer running custom code Villareal developed with his team. The evolving patterns of colorful images - many of which evoke natural phenomena such as amoebae, nerve cells, and galaxies - are the result of Villareal's experimentation with generative coding, inspired, he said, by English mathematician John Conway's "Game of Life," a cellular automaton.
"I started in the simplest way - let's make a sphere and then another sphere, and start to connect them together, and then start to add some distortion," Villareal said. "By combining them and iterating and repeating, it started to take on these patterns that mimic things we might see in nature, although I'm not attempting to do any kind of scientific visualization or illustrating any concept. It's more of me finding these connections by getting lost in the code."
