James' World 2

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In the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” an astronaut travels through a seeming tunnel of light. (In the novelization, he radios to mission control: “The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!”) Earlier this summer, Artechouse, an organization producing immersive, technology-based art, started offering a science-backed version of a similar trip at its New York venue. The show, titled “Beyond the Light,” is a looping twenty-six-minute journey through space and other realms inspired by images from the James Webb Space Telescope (J.W.S.T.). Artechouse began talks with NASA about a show in 2018, and started pulling this one together earlier this year, after the first images captured by J.W.S.T. were released to the public last July.

There’s a long tradition of art about the stars. More than sixteen thousand years ago, cave explorers in what’s now Lascaux, France, painted animals that are believed to represent the constellations. A few hundred miles away and many centuries later—near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in 1889—Vincent van Gogh made “The Starry Night,” a swirling blur of color looming over a village. “I’m sure people have been painting the heavens for as long as they’ve been looking at them,” Maggie Masetti, the NASA social-media lead for the J.W.S.T. mission, told me. “Beyond the Light” is high-tech—video is projected on three walls and the floor of a vast room, while a powerful sound system thrums—but it’s also connected to traditional astro-art in the way it’s largely abstract and impressionistic (sometimes even Cubist). Although the show makes use of images taken by the Webb telescope, it is mostly imaginative. Splashes of color, bubbles, tubes, machinery, and glowing rocks covered with runes flow across the room in response to what the telescope has found.

When the show premièred, in June—its D.C. première is this Friday—a number of researchers involved with the J.W.S.T. were in attendance, among them Stefanie Milam, a NASA astrochemist; Macarena García Marín, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency; and Mike Menzel, NASA’s mission-systems engineer for the Webb. They stood talking with Sandro Kereselidze, one of Artechouse’s founders. “It’s absolutely fantastic and beautiful,” Milam said. “We already tried to do our own art,” she went on—scientists producing images with the Webb had used “different components of the instruments, different wavelengths, or different filters, to really tell the story about a given image, because we want you to see the baby stars being formed in a giant cloud, or to see the Great Red Spot on Jupiter in multiple colors, or other storms in planetary atmospheres.” But now artists were telling other kinds of stories using the images. “What we do is sort of amateur art,” Milam said.

“We designed the telescope to wow the scientists,” Menzel agreed. Now, he said, “We’re here in an art show, watching some images that we helped produce becoming things that are almost iconic.”

Kereselidze saw similarities between the artists he worked with at Artechouse and the scientists. “We speak the same language,” he said. “We have the passion for expressing what we discovered.” There were some small science exhibits on a mezzanine, but the venue wasn’t trying to be a science museum. Instead, Kereselidze said, “The goal is to open up curious minds. If everything is, like, ‘A, B, C, D,’ it becomes like PowerPoint, right?”

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