EXPLORATION looks like an exhibit of fifteen works by artists who use modern technology instead of brushes and canvas. But when Gyorgy Kepes, director of the M. I. T. Center for Advanced Visual Studies (the show's sponsor) discusses it, Exploration becomes a set of diagrams describing ways artists might use technology to control and improve the environment. For artists improving giant cityscapes, technological media are necessary, not just innovative. When applied science increases the scale of ugliness, the attack on ugliness must also be enlarged.

Kepes hopes that artists working with science can add "new patterns, new rituals, new pageantry" to urban life, providing an equivalent to the pageantry of nature. For him art works must involve their audience in more than observation. People who visit Exploration use and modify the exhibits-and their participation makes the show fun.

Tsai's "Cybernetic Environment" includes four groups of vibrating wires, apparently of steel, illuminated by strobe lights in the dark hall. The speed of the strobe can be changed by hand-clapping, whistling, or noise-making in general. Its technical means are not complex.

One sees a field of three foot wires capped with squares, like mortarboards. A taller field of wires stands behind, with tinted silver disks on their tops. The effect is mesmerizing: two fields of waving silver, apparently changing their undulations according to the noise you make. The wires are anthropomorphic, seeming to have heads and hips, ever-waving, never-jerking hips. Sensual fantastical steel to play with. Imagine a bigger field of that in the Rockefellr Center mall, or as a street divider in Harvard Square.

William H. Wainwright worked with Kepes on "Photoclastic Floor," a path of light-polarizing plastic squares which change colors where stepped on. Their soft-edged patterns have the more-acidthan-the-Favves coloring that only this age could manufacture. Some visitors hesitated to step on their pristine surfaces. "Photoelastic Floor" is hardy enough to be walked on, however, and could be set into sidewalks, playgrounds and floors.

If Exploration seems biased toward works that depend on artificial light, this is because, as Kepes points out, the lights of a city at night are one of the most beautiful accidents caused by technology. If they could be used by artists, perhaps that beauty could be increased, and enjoyed at close range.

Non-light works were also shown, and my favorite was Takis's "Anti-Gravity," To use this, you press a foot-pedal which turns on a large electromagnetic shield. Then you can throw nails against it, in designs or handfuls, and they will stick like porcupine's quills.

Delightful as all these constructions are in the gallery, it's mind-boggling to imagine gigantic versions in a city. The greatest flaw in Exploration is that few visitors get to talk with Gyorgy Kepes. Most leave thinking they've seen a good art show, not a prospectus for urban pageantry.