The Whitney Museum of American Art launches Twin Quasar, a digital art project by Ashley Zelinskie commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for net art and new media art commissions. Twin Quasar is a virtual reality artwork and environment within the Whitney Museum Virtual Landscape, a virtual world produced by The IMC Lab on the MONA platform. Zelinskie’s new work combines elements of science and art history, and builds on the artist’s eight-year coordination with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team and discussions with European Space Agency scientist Tim Rawle.
Ashley Zelinskie’s Twin Quasar examines the influence of physics on early 20th-century abstract art, particularly Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, which challenged the established understanding of space, time, and reality. The piece consists of three-dimensional artwork and the virtual space it inhabits, incorporating two works from the Whitney’s permanent collection. Zelinskie built 3D models of László Moholy-Nagy’s Space Modulator (1938–1940) and Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne’s Compotier II (1938), so that viewers can explore them from all angles. The experience Zelinskie creates draws parallels between phenomena in physics and the artists’ experiments with space and form, highlighting Moholy-Nagy’s interest in scientific perceptions of light and space and Browne’s fascination with geometric concepts and the laws of energy governing matter. As viewers approach the digital models, the layers of the artworks are revealed in three-dimensional space. The abstract forms in these pieces morph and extend from their virtual canvases, allowing navigation between the layers and protruding shapes and bending light in space.
The interactions viewers have as they engage with Twin Quasar replicate the magnifying and distorting effects of gravitational lensing, a cosmic event that occurs when black holes, galaxies, or dark matter bend spacetime. Gravitational lensing was first detected by scientists at an Arizona observatory where they observed the light of a quasar—an extremely luminous celestial object visible with a telescope—passing through a galaxy, making it appear as though there were two quasars. The title of Zelinskie’s work is inspired by both this galactic phenomenon and the artist’s incorporation of the two artworks from the Whitney’s collection. The virtual space where the works exist is formed by a “deep field,” an image of distant galaxies provided by the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Twin Quasar can be experienced in the Whitney Museum Virtual Landscape, now available on MONA, the spatial computing platform for immersive worlds and interoperable 3D art. The digital art can also be experienced in the Apple Vision Pro, allowing viewers to dynamically adjust their immersion between virtual and physical realities. Twin Quasar is the first project to be presented in the reimagined virtual gallery, and the artist’s expertise in 3D worlds provided valuable guidance during the space’s migration from Mozilla Hubs to MONA. The Whitney’s 3D virtual space was introduced in 2023 for Refigured: A Virtual Conversation and Tour, which was a program related to an exhibition of digital art presented at the museum. The space’s initial concept was a collaborative effort between the Whitney Museum of American Art and design partners at Design Bridge and Partners.
To learn more about this virtual reality artwork, see whitney.org.