Invisible Skies Immersive Art Installation Features SJSU Creativity on January 31

On Saturday, January 31, San Joseans will have the chance to illuminate City Hall Plaza in brilliant images of the night sky taken from Lick Observatory.

A flash art installation devised by artist Elizabeth Turk, Invisible Skies is a one-time opportunity for people of all ages. The event is the result of a partnership between Turk's nonprofit, ET Projects Foundation, with San José State, the City of San José's Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs, Team San José, the Children's Discovery Museum of San José and Lick Observatory.

Turk and her team have 2,000 LED-lit umbrellas that they plan to distribute at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday to volunteers who have registered to participate. Though there is no official umbrella choreography planned, Turk says that volunteers are encouraged to wear all black and stand in formation of constellations while the evening is captured from above by aerial photographers. In fall 2025, Turk visited the SJSU Art Department to offer a Tuesday Night Lecture about the event and encourage Spartans to take part in the experience. Turk's own connection to SJSU is personal: Her mother got her teaching degree at San José State in the late 1950s.

"San José is such a success in so many ways," says Turk. "This event is to underscore the success, the joy, the optimism and the fact that it is the melting pot that it is, and that people are living happy lives in the area."

"When Elizabeth invited me to take part in Invisible Skies, I was struck by a powerful sense of synchronicity: The work's intimate relationship with the cosmos; its premiere in the San José City Hall Rotunda - the very site where Invisible Skies will unfold; and the renewed possibility of aligning the music with the shifting visual patterns of the Sonic Runway, an interaction that was not possible at the time of the piece's 2024 premiere," Luna-Mega says. "Most compelling to me is the poetic connection between Elizabeth's vision of San José's residents becoming stars - each tracing a unique, randomly determined path across the sky - and my own compositional exploration of chance, indeterminacy and emergence, which lie at the heart of the music created for this event."

Michelle Frey, '25 MFA Pictorial Art , says that Invisible Skies offers SJSU students the chance to learn the inner workings of creating a large-scale installation.

"This gives students practical, hands-on ideas on how to make a 2,000-person immersive experience happen," she says. "We're working to illuminate the darkness. Everybody grab an umbrella. If San José is being illuminated, then so is San José State, because we are coming together as a community to light up the sky."

Additional artistic partners include the New Ballet dance company, whose dancers will perform inside the City Hall Rotunda, as well as San José Taiko , a Japanese drumming ensemble founded by SJSU alumni Roy and PJ Hirabayashi, '77 MUP . Representatives from Lick Observatory and the SETI Institute will be on hand to show guests how to operate a telescope and enjoy the night sky. Percussion ensemble Bloco Del Sol will also perform.

The event is also strategically timed one week before Super Bowl LX kicks off in Silicon Valley.

"We chose the weekend before the Super Bowl for this event so it could launch a year of creativity," Turk says. She encourages local photographers to capture the event and upload their images to a shared digital space to create a living archive of imagery that can be used to promote San José during the Super Bowl in February, the NCAA March Madness events in March and the FIFA World Cup events this summer.

In other words: While the skies may be invisible, San José's creativity is ready to shine.

Sign up to distribute umbrellas at the Invisible Skies event on January 31.