It is our honor to announce that “Twin Quasars”, a virtual art project by Zelinskie, was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art for their artport collection. Ashley Zelinskie’s Twin Quasar is a three-dimensional artwork and space in the Whitney Museum Virtual Landscape that intertwines science with art history, building on the artist’s eight-year coordination with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope team and discussions with Tim Rawle, a scientist at the European Space Agency. The work uses two pieces from the Whitney Museum’s collection — László Moholy-Nagy’s painting Space Modulator (1938–1940) and Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne’s watercolor Compotier II (1938) — as sources and turns them into navigable 3D models, drawing parallels between phenomena in physics and the artists' exploration of space and form. When viewers approach the 3D models of the original works, the forms depicted in them reveal themselves as protruding from the virtual canvas, becoming layered in three-dimensional space and allowing viewers to navigate through the abstract shapes. The experience replicates the effects of gravitational lensing, a cosmic event occurring when massive objects such as black holes, galaxies, or dark matter bend light around spacetime, creating natural lenses that both magnify and distort. Gravitational lensing was first observed at an observatory in Arizona where scientists saw the light of a quasar — an extremely luminous galactic object — through a galaxy, and it appeared as though there were two quasars.
