Beck Teams With NASA for ‘Hyperspace’ Visual Album

Beck and NASA have teamed up on a visual album that transforms the singer’s Hyperspace into a journey through the cosmos.

Hyperspace: A.I. Experience pairs each track from Beck’s 2019 LP with space mission images curated by NASA’s artificial intelligence technology.

“The realization of these Hyperspaces was executed by A.I. architects and directors OSK, who asked ‘How would artificial intelligence imagine our universe?’” Beck and NASA said of the project. “In finding the answer, OSK created a unique A.I. utilizing computer vision, machine learning and Generative Adversarial neural Networks (GAN) to learn from NASA’s vast archives. After training on hundreds of thousands of images, videos and data points from NASA’s space exploration research and missions, the Hyperspace A.I. then began creating its own visions of our universe.”

Each Hyperspace track was then linked with images from a specific mission; for example, the album’s “Dark Places” features photos culled from the Hubble Space Telescope’s extensive archives for the visual album.

“I think each song is kind of a different way that different people ‘hyperspace’ — we escape from the reality that we’re dealing with,” Beck said of the pairing in a statement.

In addition to the visual album, Beck also announced a deluxe reissue of Hyperspace, due out December 4th. The limited-edition vinyl contains two extra tracks — a “Soundscape” version of “Dark Places” and Beck’s quarantine-recorded solo acoustic rendition of Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos” — as well as new 2020 mixes of the album’s “Star,” “Hyperspace,” “See Through” and “Die Waiting.” The reissue, available to preorder now, also features a holographic jacket and a 24-page booklet with AI images and NASA data for each track.

Hyperspace: A.I. Experience Tracklist

Hyperlife | Landsat 8, International Space Station
Uneventful Days | Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Apollo 12
Saw Lightning | Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Curiosity Rover, Viking 1 Orbiter
Die Waiting | Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
Chemical | Cassini-Huygens
Hyperspace | Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
Stratosphere | Spitzer Space Telescope
Dark Places | Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
Star | Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Swift, Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
Everlasting Nothing | Hubble Space Telescope (HST)