Exploratorium · Embarcadero, Northern Waterfront

Glow

Upcoming19 November 2026 – 24 January 2027·$39.95

The winter light show returns: 91 moving infinity mirrors, spinning sculptures, an LED dungeon-crawler game, a beacon of eyeglass lenses and a Glow Cinema.

Exhibition website Book tickets

Preview: written before the show opened

Hidden Beacon looks like a single beam of white light until you put on the polarized glasses provided. Then its thousands of prescription eyeglass lenses, collected by the Canadian Lions Eyeglass Recycling Centre, fill with colour through double refraction. It's a sculpture made of strangers' old glasses that you need another pair of glasses to see properly.

Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett built it for the Exploratorium, and it stays in Gallery 3 after Glow closes. Around it are five more light works and a cinema. You can bend a spring to steer a green pixel through Line Wobbler's nine levels, a returning favourite, or step inside Cat Scott's bubble. Glow Cinema loops 32 minutes of short films, including one made with cyanobacteria.

The show hasn't opened, so there are no reviews yet. It runs 19 November to 24 January in Bechtel Gallery 3, free with museum admission and for members.

Look for

Hidden Beacon through polarized glasses
A white column of thousands of recycled prescription lenses, evoking a lighthouse beam or falling water, breaks into colour once you look through the polarized glasses provided.
The Gateway's 91 infinity mirrors
OK Design's 91 infinity mirrors tilt in sync on 182 motors, lit by 11,000 LEDs, so the patterns seem to run on past the sculpture's edges.
Line Wobbler
Bend a spring controller to move a green pixel along an LED strip, flick it to attack, and fight past lava and force fields across nine levels.
Inside Inner Horizons
Step inside Cat Scott's bubble sculpture, kept moving by sixteen aquarium pumps, glycerin and LED light, meant to feel like deep space, the ocean floor or the womb.
Good Vibrations
Paul Friedlander spins carbon-fibre and fibreglass rods under colour-changing strobe light, so they appear as glowing, multicoloured three-dimensional waveforms.

Good for

Rainy Days
Teenagers

With kids

Kids can steer Line Wobbler's pixel through nine levels with a spring controller and try two Tinkering Studio activities, Light Painting and Shadow Creatures, which run for the whole show.