Just above the front window on the white school bus, where a destination is usually listed, are the words Make the Journey. A mirror image of the phrase - upside down - also is there, providing just the slimmest of notions of what riders will experience.

The 44-passenger diesel-engine bus had been transformed into a rolling movie house of sorts, a fusion of physics, art, and sound that provided riders with a perception-shattering view of the village streets and rural roadways of central New York.

The riders - hundreds of Colgate students, Hamilton residents, and area schoolchildren -- entered the realm of the Bus Obscura, a collaborative project launched on Colgate's campus under the direction of visiting artist Simon Lee, of New York City.

Lee worked with art professor DeWitt Godfrey and about a dozen Colgate students to transform a regular school bus into a multiple aperture camera obscura.

Lee relies on Leonardo da Vinci to explain the physics behind a camera obscura, but for his project it boils down to bus riders seeing hundreds of small animated projections - which are upside down - meld into each other as the bus stops and starts.

Chris Lura, of Hamilton, who rode the bus when it debuted at the Hamilton Village Green on a rainy Saturday morning, wasn't exactly sure what he had seen, but he liked it.

"I would call it very beautiful, and it certainly was fascinating to see things that are familiar to me in everyday life become rather anonymous," said Lura.

Godfrey worked with Patricia Von Mechow, of the Partnership for Community Development (PCD), on having the Bus Obscura be at the Village Green on two consecutive Saturdays for residents to experience.

The collaboration turned into a happy ride for Hamilton resident Katie Duggan-Haas, who rode the bus with her daughters Kiana, 5 ½, and Nellie, 2, and her husband, Don.

"It definitely has this urban art feel to it, but it's nice to have that experience here in our little town," said Duggan-Haas.

The "public art" aspect of the project was a main reason for bringing it to campus, said Godfrey.

"Not only does the project fit into our campus community in an interesting way, but it's a sophisticated work of art that we can take from place to place, allowing us to do some really interesting community outreach," said Godfrey.

Melissa Davies, education coordinator for the Picker Art Gallery, arranged for Bus Obscura rides for several area schools and hundreds of schoolchildren.

Cynthia Brownell, an art teacher at Madison Central Schools, said her students were focusing on the right brain/left brain theory of creative expression and the Bus Obscura trip helped her class explore how an artist might feel in "right-brain mode."

"It was definitely an experience, and the students really enjoyed the trip," she said.

Colgate students also learned a great deal from working with Lee and being engaged in the project from beginning to end (which came at about 3 in the morning, just six hours before the project's debut on Sept. 23).

Leslie Petsoff ‘07, an art history major, discovered that it can take a lot of hard work, some of it quite repetitive, to feed an idea and have it blossom into a tangible project.

"Many of the required phases of planning and construction were difficult and time-consuming, but each step was clearly vital to the finished product. It was interesting to see how individuals' small separate tasks came together and contributed to the completed bus," said Petsoff.

Those tasks involved punching 1,000 small holes into the 500 square feet of vinyl that was used to black out the bus windows. Hundreds of tiny planar convex lenses were placed in the holes, and thin frosted plexiglass was positioned about two inches from the windows in the interior, serving as "screens" on which the constant images from outside swirled and melded and merged.

Artist Colleen Burke spent four days on campus and developed a unique soundtrack for the bus that provided another layer for the passengers' experiences.

A heavy curtain served as a partition near the front of the bus, putting the audience in near total darkness, and the outside of the bus was adorned with big letters spelling out Bus Obscura.

When it's dismantled on Oct. 8, after ferrying art patrons in Utica from Sculpture Space to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, the bus will return to its normal appearance without any signs of its two-week stint as a roaming theater.

"It was amazing to see Simon create solutions on the go for a project that had an extremely tight timetable," said Mike Silber '09.

The "director" of the show, which varied depending on the amount of sunlight, traffic conditions, and route, was bus driver Gary Edgett, of Hamilton.

Edgett works for Bernie Bus Services, which runs the Colgate Cruiser on campus, and for two weeks the Bus Obscura became part of the regular shuttle service for students.

"It was really interesting to see Colgate and Hamilton, places that we spend so much time, in such a completely different view," said Shannon Young '09. "It was shadowy and sort of creepy."

The Colgate Bus Obscura is the fifth incarnation of a concept Lee unveiled in Miami Beach in 2004, and then re-introduced in New York City, Pittsburgh, London, and Kampala, Uganda.

Godfrey rode the Bus Obscura in New York City last year, when it was part of the Armory Art Show.

He knew that bringing Lee and Bus Obscura would fit in well with the goals set by the university's newly established Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts and its ArtsMix program.

He organized the effort through the institute and the Department of Art and Art History, and he received additional support from the Picker Art Gallery, Upstate Institute, Bernie Bus Services Inc., and the PCD.

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