The Cash Bar of Adulthood

For most of us, the Exploratorium conjures up memories of childhood field trips: being led in single-file lines, electrocuting pickles, and sticking our hands into bowls of cold spaghetti and peeled grapes while blindfolded. This evening, the science museum urges grown-ups to leave their children at home with the sitter, drive at mature and lawful speeds to the Marina, and partake of an adult-oriented celebration of decadence, the likes of which civilization has not witnessed since the reign of Emperor Nero. In other words, there is a cash bar. This week’s edition of Exploratorium After Dark also features a spectacle by the aptly named etudes4violin&electronix, in which Haitian-American artist Daniel Bernard Roumain fiddles alongside remixing collaborator DJ Scientific. Laptops, strings, and turntables climb all over each other in a figurative inferno not equaled since the literal inferno of the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64. The excitement continues once a week throughout April, with a special Science After Dark event on April 16 that transforms the museum into a carnival of phenomena that includes — wait for it — trained goldfish.
Thu., April 2, 8 p.m., 2009