“That whole process is really inspiring for people who are behind the scenes, like us, the studio team and the designers.” Some of the imagery in the show-such as wiring maps and shards of machinery-is dedicated to the telescope’s engineering. “There’s decades of humanity’s best efforts in science, optical engineering, you name it” behind the pictures, she said. Kim said that she was moved not just by what the telescope shows us but by how it does so. They were like pop stars, she said-winning and charismatic-whereas “the Phantom Galaxy has that rock-star kind of appeal to it. She contrasted it with the Cosmic Cliffs and the Pillars of Creation, two regions of nebulae that had also been strikingly photographed. Something resembling a blue, glowing eye sits at the center of what looks like a cobweb going down the drain of a black marble sink. Her favorite Webb image, she said, showed the Phantom Galaxy, a spiral galaxy thirty-two million light years away, which the telescope captured using an infrared instrument. “Every exhibit that we produce is a celebration of a combination of science and technology and art,” she said. The floating rocks with glowing inscriptions on them alluded to prehistoric cave paintings the drifting bubbles represented quantum foam, theoretical fluctuations in space-time. Later, over Zoom, Riki Kim, the executive creative director of Artechouse, explained the meaning behind some of the seemingly disconnected visuals. If everything is, like, ‘A, B, C, D,’ it becomes like PowerPoint, right?” Instead, Kereselidze said, “The goal is to open up curious minds. “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. Kereselidze saw similarities between the artists he worked with at Artechouse and the scientists. Now, he said, “We’re here in an art show, watching some images that we helped produce becoming things that are almost iconic.” “We designed the telescope to wow the scientists,” Menzel agreed. “What we do is sort of amateur art,” 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. “It’s absolutely fantastic and beautiful,” Milam said. They stood talking with Sandro Kereselidze, one of Artechouse’s founders. 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. première is this Friday-a number of researchers involved with the J.W.S.T. When the show premièred, in June-its D.C. Splashes of color, bubbles, tubes, machinery, and glowing rocks covered with runes flow across the room in response to what the telescope has found. Although the show makes use of images taken by the Webb telescope, it is mostly imaginative. “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). “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. 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. More than sixteen thousand years ago, cave explorers in what’s now Lascaux, France, painted animals that are believed to represent the constellations. There’s a long tradition of art about the stars. 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. 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.). (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. In the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” an astronaut travels through a seeming tunnel of light.
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