Gaiascope

Created for SJ’26, Gaiascope extends San José’s World Cup cultural energy through Aug. 18 at Circle of Palms.

San José, CA — Multidisciplinary artist Brooke Einbender, founder of Mindbender Studio, is showcasing Gaiascope, a large-scale interactive public art installation commissioned by the City of San José’s Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs as part of SJ’26 and San José’s World Cup cultural programming.

On view from May 22 through August 18, 2026, at Circle of Palms, 110 South Market Street, Gaiascope remains open to the public after the Bay Area match dates, extending the cultural energy of SJ’26 into downtown San José.

The installation features three suspended kaleidoscopic sculptures. Visitors look into mirrored chambers where video art, light, and reflection multiply into shifting patterns of color, fractals, and movement. Each sculpture includes a rotating video artwork composed of locally sourced nature footage and original virtual reality art created by Einbender, while nearby interactive pedestals allow visitors to alter the colors, patterns, and speed in real time. The more visitors engage with the pedestals, the more dynamic the experience becomes.

By day, Gaiascope’s mirrored sculptures reflect the surrounding plaza. At night, the work becomes most powerful: illuminated interiors reveal layers of video art, color, reflection, and interactive light, transforming the sculptures into glowing psychedelic worlds.

“I started as a painter, but I kept wanting to enter into the colorful worlds I was painting,” says Einbender. “Virtual reality lets me expand beyond the canvas and paint with digital ink in three-dimensional space, allowing me to step inside those painted worlds. Now, public art lets me share that experience with other people. Gaiascope brings that whole journey together through mirrors, video art, light, landscape, and interaction. What excites me is how psychedelic it becomes when you look inside—the reflections keep expanding, the imagery keeps shifting, and you feel like you’re gazing into another world.”

City of San José Director of Cultural Affairs Kerry Adams Hapner says, “As San José is on the world stage in 2026 as it hosts major sports and cultural events that attract international, national, regional and local visitors to downtown San José, it is critical that San José’s unique cultural identity is on full display. As the capital of Silicon Valley, San José has a deep connection to art and technology. With this nexus and its spark of creative joy through participants’ interaction, Gaiascope adds a transformational quality to the San José experience.”

Born in the Bay Area, Einbender brings Gaiascope to San José during a year of international attention for the region. Installed in the heart of Silicon Valley, the work offers a human-centered expression of technology: tactile, public, playful, and rooted in place.

As Gaiascope travels to different locations across the country, the nature-inspired video artwork displayed inside the sculptures changes for each site. For the San José presentation, Einbender combines Northern California nature footage with original VR-based artwork, creating imagery that moves between local landscape, digital painting, abstraction, and organic pattern. This allows Gaiascope to function as both an art-and-technology installation and a reflection of the place where it is shown.

“Gaiascope is really about place,” says Einbender. “Gaia is Mother Nature, the spirit of our planet, and I wanted the work to reveal the natural world in a way that feels both familiar and completely unfamiliar to invite new ways of seeing. I study the landscape where the piece is shown, then gather imagery from that place—from vast aerial views to tiny organic patterns like lichen and seashells. Inside the mirrored chamber, the natural and digital dissolve into one another, creating a rotating video sequence that becomes a visual diary of each location.”

Free and open to the public, Gaiascope invites audiences of all ages to gather, explore, and participate. For San José and Silicon Valley audiences, it offers a public encounter with creative technology that is visual, interactive, and designed to be experienced together.

Einbender is an internationally exhibited multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans oil painting, virtual reality, projection mapping, video art, sculpture, and public art. Her work uses portals as physical and perceptual thresholds—inviting transformation, reflection, and expanded awareness—and has been presented through a solo exhibition during Art Basel Miami, permanent architectural installations for Arlo Hotels, projects for Auberge Resorts Collection, and public art commissions across the United States. A TEDx speaker with work held in private collections, Einbender creates from both urban environments and remote landscapes, with recent studios ranging from historic mining sites in Colorado to a yurt in Alaska.