In the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," an astronaut goes through what looks like a light tube. He tells mission control over the radio, "The thing is hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God! It's full of stars!"
This summer, Artechouse, a group that makes immersive, technology-based art, started giving a similar trip that was based on science at its New York location.
Based on pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope (J.W.S.T.), the 26-minute show "Beyond the Light" loops and takes you through space and other worlds.
There were talks between Artechouse and NASA about putting on a show in 2018. Work on this show began earlier this year, after the first pictures taken by J.W.S.T. were made public in July of last year.
Star-themed art has been around for a long time. More than 16,000 years ago, people who explored the caves in what is now Lascaux, France, made pictures of animals that are thought to be the constellations.
A few hundred miles away and many hundreds of years later, in 1889, near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Vincent van Gogh painted "The Starry Night," a town covered in a swirling mess of colour.
Maggie Masetti, who is in charge of social media for the JWST project for NASA, told me, "I'm sure people have been painting the heavens for as long as they've been looking at them."
A powerful sound system rumbles while video is displayed on three walls and the floor of a huge room. "Beyond the Light" is high-tech, but it's also similar to traditional astro-art in that most of the art is abstract and impressionistic, and some of it is even cubist.
The show mostly makes things up, but it does use pictures taken by the Webb satellite. Because of what the binoculars found, the room is filled with colour splashes, bubbles, tubes, machinery, and glowing rocks with runes on them.