Lynn Adrich, Pilgrimage: Through the Wormhole 2008
installation in progress

Right on the heels of my post about Planets as Art, a press release from JPL is announcing a new exhibit in Pasadena that is the result of collaboration between the Spitzer space telescope team and the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. From the press release:

For thousands of years, people have used art to explore ideas that humble, confuse or even frighten us. A new exhibition opening in Pasadena continues this tradition, bringing artists and astronomers together to create original pieces of art.

…
“Science is bringing us spectacular discoveries that torque our everyday perception of reality. Things like black holes, multiple universes and time distortions challenge our human-centered culture and beliefs,” said Stephen Nowlin, director of the Williamson Gallery. “This is an exhibition about the newly unknown.”

The exhibits sound pretty surreal: a room-sized clock made of spheres that play distorted and delayed noises (apparently to represent redshift), a laser light show that encodes all of the commands sent so far to the spitzer space telescope, and a giant fuzzy tunnel that is supposed to be a wormhole.

Sounds weird and awesome to me, kind of like our universe…