In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, an astronaut walks through what appears to be a tunnel of light. (In the novel, he radios mission control: “This thing is hollow—it’s going to go on forever—and—oh my God!—There are stars everywhere!”) Earlier this summer, Artechouse, an organization that produces immersive techno-art, began offering a science-backed version of a similar trip at its New York venue. The show, titled “Beyond the Light,” is a 26-minute looping journey , traveling through space and beyond, inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Artehouse began with NASA about a show in 2018 and began putting together the show earlier this year after the first photos captured by JWST were released to the public last July.
There is a long tradition of art about the stars. Sixteen thousand years ago, cave explorers in what is now Lascaux, France, painted animals thought to represent the constellations. In 1889, hundreds of miles away and many centuries later, near Saint-Remy-de-Provence, Vincent van Gogh painted “Starry Night,” a blurry swirl of color that envelopes a village. “I believe that as long as people have been looking at the sky, they have been painting the sky,” Maggie Masetti NASA the JWST mission’s social media lead told me. “Beyond Light and Shadow” is high-tech—videos are projected on three walls and the floor of a huge room while a powerful sound system hums—but it’s also as much about traditional astronomical art as it is about are abstract and impressionistic (sometimes even cubist). Although the show uses images taken by the Webb telescope, it is primarily imaginative. Colors, bubbles, pipes, machinery and glowing rocks covered in runes flow through the room in response to the telescope’s discoveries.
When the show premiered in June (it premieres this Friday in Washington), many of the researchers involved with JWST were in attendance, including Stefanie Milam, NASA astrophysicist; Macarena García Marín, astrophysicist, European Space Agency; and Mike Menzel, NASAWebb’s mission systems engineer. They stood talking to Sandro Kereselidze, one of the founders of Artehouse. “It’s absolutely wonderful and beautiful,” Milam said. “We’ve tried to make our own art,” she continued—scientists who made images with the Webb telescope used “different components of the instrument, different wavelengths, or different filters, to really tell the story of a given image. story, because we want you to be able to see baby stars forming in giant clouds, or see the many colors of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, or other storms in the planet’s atmosphere.” But now artists are using these images to tell the story Other types of stories. “What we do is amateur art,” Milam said.
“We design telescopes to wow scientists,” Menzel agrees. Now, he said, “We’re here at an art show looking at some of the images we helped create that have become almost iconic.”
Kereselidze discovered similarities between the artists and scientists he worked with at Artehouse. “We speak the same language,” he said. “We are keen to express our findings.” There are some small science exhibits on the mezzanine, but the venue is not trying to be a science museum. Instead, Kresselizer says, “The goal is to open up curiosity. If everything was ‘A, B, C, D,’ then it would be like PowerPoint, right?”
Later, via Zoom, Riki Kim, Artehouse’s executive creative director, explained the meaning behind some seemingly unrelated visuals. The floating rocks are carved with luminous inscriptions, hinting at prehistoric cave paintings. The floating bubbles represent quantum foam, the theoretical fluctuations in space and time. “Every exhibit we create is a celebration of the union of science and technology with art,” she said. She said her favorite Webb image shows the Phantom Galaxy, a spiral galaxy 32 million light-years away that the telescope captured using infrared instruments. The drain of the black marble sink drain resembles a spider web with something resembling a blue glowing eye in the center. She contrasted it with the Cosmic Cliff and the Pillars of Creation, two nebula regions that have also been photographed strikingly. They were like pop stars, she said—triumphant and charismatic—whereas “Phantom Galaxy has a rock star appeal. It’s moody. There’s a certain mystique.”
King said she was moved not only by what the telescope showed us, but also by how it worked. She said that behind these photos is “the greatest effort of mankind in science, optical engineering and other fields in decades.” “The whole process has been really inspiring for the people behind the scenes like us, the studio team and the designers.” Some of the images in the exhibition, such as wiring diagrams and mechanical fragments, are dedicated to the engineering of the telescope. King noted that at a high level, the show is about how we have experienced light throughout the history of civilization, and how we continue to push boundaries to see more of it. “This is our tribute to the technological infrastructure of discovery,” King said.
In July 2022, Brooklyn conceptual artist Ashley Zelinskie NASAGoddard Space Flight Center in Maryland when the first Webb images were released in front of scientists and media. “It was a very emotional room,” she recalled. “When the images came back, everyone was so excited, with tears in their eyes.” That October, her solo exhibition “Unfolding the Universe: First Light” (curator) NASAMasetti), opened in ornks Studio, located in New York City. One depicts the telescope itself, with its hexagonal array of gilded mirrors. The 3D printed sculpture “Exploration” depicts panels with three arms extending out of them, wrapped in the mathematics used to build the telescope. Another 3D printed sculpture, the Southern Ring Nebula, looks like a porcupine crossed with a snake, and its rings are reminiscent of the planetary nebula of the same name in the constellation Vela.
Some art is interactive. The 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life included a telescopic image of five galaxies called the “Stephen Quintet”; Webb produced the latest high-resolution image of the galaxies, a grouping that reminded Zelinsky of Five figures in Matisse’s painting “Dance”. She brought them to life by creating her own “La Danse,” a hologram of a dancing star that viewers could control using motion sensors. Scientists pointed the telescope at a black patch of sky roughly the diameter of a grain of sand at arm’s length and collected light for more than twelve hours, creating an image called Webb’s First Deep Field; the process revealed Thousands of layered galaxies, each containing light collected at different infrared wavelengths. “The way they described the process, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this sounds so much like screen printing,'” Zelinsky said. So she made “Deep Fields,” which are screen prints of images. Viewers can insert plastic pegs into dark areas of the work and they will light up, suggesting that if the telescope looked longer, it might find something there too. “No matter where you look, there’s probably a star there,” she said.
Due in part to the telescope’s hexagonal mirror, the star appears as six points in the image it creates. These points are visible in the 3D printed sculpture “She Signs the Star.” “It’s a bit like the telescope signing its own work of art – like the telescope itself is an artist,” Zelinsky said. “These images are very intimidating for artists to create art because they are so beautiful. How do we improve them?” When the first Weber images were released, Zelinsky wasn’t trying to base his work on a specific image. to create art; for months, she kept looking at an image of the Carina Nebula called “Cosmic Cliff.” “It was so amazing, and all I could say was, ‘What can I say about this?'” she recalled. As we spoke, she was working on a tapestry that she wanted to get just right.
Zelinsky believes that artists and scientists are not that different. They are people trying to figure out their place in the universe. “Humanity is the universe observing itself,” she told me. “I want people to leave my artwork feeling deeply connected to the universe.”
In the 1800s, Gustav Holst composed The Planets, an orchestral work inspired not by astronomy but by astrology. Its seven movements focus on Mars as the bringer of war, Venus as the bringer of peace, and so on. (Holst excluded Earth; Pluto has not yet been discovered or demoted.) Although the suite is based on the zodiac, Goddard’s executive producer Wade Sisler once created a Movies about the zodiac. NASA The imagery that accompanies The Planets, as he did for other musical works. A few years ago, Piotr Gajewski, music director and conductor of the National Philharmonic in Maryland, decided to reverse the process, asking Sisler to create films with stellar imagery that would then be scored by the composer. In May, with partners NASA, the National Philharmonic premieres “Cosmic Cycle,” an artistic work that combines the images and works of Henry Dehlinger. Its seventh movement, “Echoes of the Big Bang,” musically dramatizes cosmological images, including many from Weber.
Dellinger studied Webb’s version of the Pillars of Creation – a region of the nebula where new stars are being created. The Hubble Space Telescope photographed the same region, capturing the brown, nearly opaque appendage, but Webb’s near-infrared camera penetrated the clouds to reveal the stars within. “What you see is a nursery of stars,” Dellinger told me. “You kind of want to see what the origin of our solar system might have been like. You can’t help but feel some sense of love.” When the image appears during a “cosmic cycle,” the sound stops. “I used a combination of strings and woodwinds, played very pianissimo,” he says, “and the sound group gave it an uplifting feel.” The strings and woodwinds played off each other, creating a moment that was both ethereal and imperial. .
“This is a classic example of how music can follow the emotion created by an image,” Dellinger said. He went on to say that orchestras are great at conveying multiple emotions at once – spatial imagery can do the same. “You can have majesty, longing and ethereal coexist,” he said. “You know you’re dealing with great material when it evokes more than one emotion.”
Professional artists weren’t the only ones inspired by the telescope’s original material. 2016, NASA Twenty-five applicants, including Zelinsky, were invited to see the instrument being built at Goddard. Most of them used it as the basis for works for the following year’s “Art + Science” exhibition; among other creations they produced paintings, poetry and music. Then, in 2020, Massetti expanded the effort, creating the social media hashtag #UnfoldTheUniverse and inviting people of any age to post photos of themselves and the art to express what they thought Weber might discover. Hundreds of items were shared, and it went on: there were paintings (and nail polish), tree ornaments, cakes, teapots, and quilts. “Art is a great way to build bridges,” Massetti told me. “A lot of people think science is hard, or not for them. But science can be inspiring, and space is for everyone.”
A few weeks after seeing the Artehouse show, I fled the city and went to Montana. When I look up at night, I see how crowded our neighborhood is, larger than a city neighborhood. The sky – oh my God! — full of stars. I felt small and huge at the same time, a tiny part of something bigger. The work of art I see is the universe—and I am a part of it. ❖
