This year marks the centenary of San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Internation Exhibition (PPIE), a cause for year-long celebrations throughout the City. Our keynote speaker, Kevin Cain, will introduce Walter D'Arcy Ryan's spectacular lighting design for the PPIE. Director of General Electric's Illuminating Engineering Laboratory early in the last century, Ryan designed groundbreaking large-scale projects that changed exposition lighting forever. Cain, a member of the artist collective Engineers of Illumination, will show archive footage of the PPIE's lighted works, including a 2.6 billion footcandle beam projector array called the Great Scintillator. Kevin will also trace modern reverberations of the PPIE, from Robert Whitman's Expo 70 work in Osaka to clips from Cain's 2015 work The Illuminated Palace for the California Historical Society.
