The object index.

01

Pillars of Creation

NASA / Hubble Space Telescope, 1995

Environmental

The Hubble images are themselves aesthetic objects—the result of deliberate color and compositional choices by scientists working in the tradition of Romantic landscape painting. In Cosmo-Nought they function as environment: the deep-space backdrop against which everything else orbits.

02

Oumuamua

First confirmed interstellar object

Environmental

Oumuamua—the first confirmed interstellar object to pass through our solar system—hangs overhead for the length of the experience.

03

Sputnik 1

Spacecraft model, Soviet Union, 1960–61
On loan from The Walker Library of The History of Human Imagination

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The object that started the Space Race—and the silhouette whose QR code opens the experience. In AR, it completes a circle: the satellite that launched the age of orbital anxiety becomes the portal into a meditation on what that anxiety produced.

04

Yuri Gagarin

Miniature painted bust · Soviet Union · Collection Wende Museum

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The first person to travel into space—one orbit of the Earth in 89 minutes, aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. After the flight Gagarin became a national hero and a global celebrity, honored in streets, monuments, and ceramics across the Soviet Union.

05

Catch Up with the U.S.A. and Surpass the U.K. in Rocket Power

Jingdezhen Sculpture Factory, People's Republic of China, 1960s
Porcelain, glaze, paint · Collection Wende Museum

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A worker and farmer ride a rocket into space, scroll in hand. The Space Race was never just two nations. China's porcelain propaganda—produced while Mao sought to outpace the West—arrives in AR orbit as a small, absurd, entirely earnest object of political ambition.

06

Cosmonaut with Alien Being

Ukraine Korosten Porcelain Factory, Soviet Ukraine, 1960s–70s
Porcelain · Collection Daniel Wojcik

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The Soviet imagination colliding with itself: a cosmonaut and an extraterrestrial, rendered in the same domestic medium as commemorative dinnerware. The piece sits at the exact intersection of the show's Space Race and Aliens sections.

07

Laika—First Traveler to Space

Prisiazhniuk porcelain factory · 1960s–70s · porcelain · Collection Wende Museum

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The first living creature to orbit the globe. Laika's voyage was always meant to be a one-way trip—the technology to bring her back did not yet exist. Her legacy lives on in a great deal of ephemera celebrating the first canine traveler in outer space.

08

Balthazar, Halo

Mark Steven Greenfield, 2021
Gold leaf and acrylic on wood panel · Courtesy of the artist

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Greenfield—son of a Tuskegee Airman, raised as the only Black student in a Catholic school in Taiwan—places King Balthazar, one of the Three Wise Men, at the center of a space painting. The Star of Bethlehem becomes a navigational beacon. Gold leaf catches the light. In AR, it rotates slowly above the user.

09

Abduction (partial)

David van Eyssen, 2026 · life-scale XR

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Appears in the AR sequence as a partial element; the full work is installed in the exhibition's Aliens section. The catalogue describes it as "a more symbolic approach to the subject matter, motivated by his own experience of medical treatment for a disease that took hold of his body and made it a site of intervention"—a scene that references religious ascension narratives, extraterrestrial abduction stories, and immigration raids in the United States. xr.auteur-studio.com ↗

10

Sketch of the Monument to the First Woman Cosmonaut

Soviet Union, n.d.
Watercolor, gouache on cardboard · Collection Wende Museum

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Valentina Tereshkova flew on Vostok 6 in June 1963—the first woman in space, 48 orbits in 71 hours under the call sign "Chaika." The monument stands in the Altai Territory of Siberia, near where she landed at 53°N, 80°E; its inscription reads, "To the first woman cosmonaut." This watercolor sketch of it is among the most intimate objects in the show: a hand-drawn document of public commemoration, orbiting in virtual space alongside the ceramic and the satellite.

11

Alternate book cover assembly

Animated sequence

Triggers agent

The sequence ends where it began—the catalogue cover, reassembled in space. A black disc. A blinking red light. Then the docent speaks.

12

Saturn as Seen from Titan

Chesley Bonestell, 1940
Mixed media on paper · Collection Adler Planetarium

Panel · confirm

Bonestell—"the father of modern space art"—imagined the planet from the surface of its moon using clay models, photography, and painting. It became one of the most iconic works in American space art—and it is the painting on the cover of the printed catalogue.