Made possible with a gift from Robert and Avery Moric, father and son ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts alumni (Architecture Class of 1991 and Architecture and Barrett, The Honors College Class of 2023) and the ASU President’s Club.

Commissioned by Arizona State University Art Museum with funding by The Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation with additional funding by the Herberger Institute Dean’s Creativity Council.

“Art has a much bigger role to play in society. Everyone needs access to art, and at this time, we need art even more.” -Leo Villareal

“Point Cloud (ASU)” is a commissioned artwork by Leo Villareal designed specifically for the ASU Art Museum in the Nelson Fine Arts Center. During his visit to the ASU Art Museum, Villareal was inspired by the museum’s architecture, designed by Antoine Predock in 1987. “The building defines a journey, a procession; it defines options and potentials rather than particular paths. It is an open matrix of possibilities rather than particular paths. It is an open matrix of possibilities for engagement both vertically and horizontally,” Predock said on the experience of walking through the building. Inspired by this phenomenon, Villareal worked with Kaarta, the mobile 3D scan technology company, to map both the inside and outside of the building, creating over 200,000,000 data points. With the accumulated information, the artist manipulated the data points by employing his custom software to create this public artwork, seeking to deconstruct and reconstruct architectural rules and systems. “Point Cloud (ASU)” is the first instance Villareal has used actual data sampled from a location as part of an artwork.

In “Point Cloud (ASU),” Villareal focuses on the blurred boundaries between abstraction, recognition, and perception through monolithic screens mounted within the museum’s existing architecture. Through moving layers of light, Villareal renders the museum’s mapped spaces to reveal details of architecture that are not recognizable to the naked eye. The ever-changing lumens, slowly panning up and down stairs, through hallways and colonnades, echo a sort of procession throughout the museum. At times, the dots, lines, and planes create a recognizable image, but often, viewers are taken on a journey that dissolves into abstraction. The ongoing movement prompts consideration for deeper understandings of the masses and forms around us, questioning what we can see in front of us and what is ephemeral. “Point Cloud (ASU)” serves as a meditation on Predock’s work, revealing the deep layers and references embedded in the architecture as it ascends toward the heavens and descends into the earth.

Explore the ASU Art Museum’s public art with works by Leo Villareal, Robert Arneson, Luis Jimenez and Eduardo Sarabia.