Categories
GeekWire

These student art projects will be out of this world

OK Go with winners
Members of the OK Go performance-art band (at left) give the good word to one of the winning teams (shown on the screen at right) in the Art in Space contest. (OK Go via YouTube)

Three students are getting ready for a space experiment that will use gravity and magnetism to simulate the origin of planet Earth. Another trio plans to create a musical composition that’s based on blips of cosmic radiation.

We’re not talking about strictly scientific experiments here: These are the winning entries in an art contest set up by the performance-art rock band OK Go to fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship.

The Art in Space contest follows up on OK Go’s viral “Upside Down & Inside Out” video, which splashed paint all over the interior of an airplane during a zero-gravity parabolic airplane flight.

OK Go Sandbox, the nonprofit venture established by the group in league with the University of St. Thomas’ Playful Learning Lab, struck a deal with Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture to let kids do something similarly creative during the weightless phase of New Shepard’s flight.

Unlike OK Go, the winners of the contest won’t be floating in zero-G. The experiments are designed to do their thing autonomously, under controlled conditions, without splattering stuff on New Shepard’s nice new upholstery.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

By Alan Boyle

Mastermind of Cosmic Log, contributor to GeekWire and Universe Today, author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference," past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: