Get in touchAshley Zelinskie · Whitney Museum of American Art
Twin Quasar
An artwork you can walk into. Two works from the Whitney’s collection open into three-dimensional space, shaped by eight years of work alongside NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team. MONA brings it to the browser, to Apple Vision Pro, and to the gallery.
Ashley Zelinskie, still from Twin Quasar, 2024
The work
Where art history meets astrophysics
Twin Quasar is a three-dimensional artwork and space by Ashley Zelinskie, commissioned for artport, the Whitney Museum’s home for internet art. It grew out of the artist’s eight-year coordination with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team and her conversations with Tim Rawle, a scientist at the European Space Agency.
The piece takes two works from the Whitney’s collection, László Moholy-Nagy’s painting Space Modulator (1938-1940) and Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne’s watercolor Compotier II (1938), and rebuilds them as 3D models. Walk toward one and its forms push out of the canvas and layer into space, so you can move through the abstraction itself.
The effect follows gravitational lensing, in which massive objects such as black holes and galaxies bend light and act as natural lenses that magnify and distort. It was first observed at an observatory in Arizona, where the light of a single quasar, seen through a galaxy, appeared as two.
- Artist
- Ashley Zelinskie
- Year
- 2024
- Commission
- artport, Whitney Museum of American Art
- Works from the collection
- László Moholy-Nagy, Space Modulator (1938-1940). Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne, Compotier II (1938).
- Science
- NASA's James Webb Space Telescope team. Tim Rawle, European Space Agency.
- Technical development
- James Tunick, CEO, The IMC Lab
- Presented on
- MONA
Watch
Exploring Twin Quasar: On Art, Science, and Virtual Worlds
Video: Whitney Museum of American Art
Experience it
One work, three ways in
In your browser
Open Twin Quasar on MONA and move through it from your own screen. Nothing to install.
Enter Twin QuasarIn Apple Vision Pro
Step inside the work with the MONA Museum app, and choose how much of the room around you stays in view.
Get the MONA Museum appAt the Whitney
In the gallery, one visitor steps into the work in a headset while a wall display follows their view for everyone else in the room.
See it on whitney.orgWork with MONA
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