Excerpts from Fast Company’s article:

“The Art in Space contest marks the most ambitious effort yet from the band OK Go’s nonprofit venture, OK Go Sandbox. Sponsored by Google, Morton Salt, and Cognizant Technology Solutions, OK Go Sandbox is a partnership between the band and University of St. Thomas’s Playful Learning Lab, an organization that works with educators in the K-12 system to find unusual ways of engaging students. Sandbox’s focus—providing online resources to teach STEAM lessons using OK Go videos—is not quite as unusual as it sounds: Teachers have been showing the band’s videos in classrooms for years.

After creating web content including curriculum guides and new videos designed for classrooms, the team decided it was time to encourage young fans to build an elaborate art project on an OK Go scale. Out of that idea came Art in Space, a contest funded by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, with the help of Cognizant and the University of St. Thomas, which will put two student teams’ art experiments aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft.

Submitting to Art in Space required each team describe in detail their proposed project, necessary materials, and methodology, accompanied by illustrations. The two winning teams, which the band has just announced, hail from New York (Annie and Gracie Clark, and Alexandra Slabakis) and Utah (Blake and Kellen Hullinger and Cameron Trueblood), and are all between 11 and 16 years old.

The New York team’s submission, Dark Origin, is a kinetic art project where differently sized bits of “space debris” will rise in waves and gradually envelop a magnetized wire art sculpture. The group plans to harness anti-gravity to mix the debris and mimic the conditions of Earth’s humble beginnings.

The Utah team, on the other hand, went all in on one idea from the beginning—for space itself to write a song using cosmic radiation—and continued fine-tuning it throughout the submission process.”

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