Rachel Rose: artist sets out on Gravity-inspired space odyssey

The young artist's new work at New York's Whitney tries to make viewers feel as though they're floating in the heavens - with help from Aretha Franklin

From space, the Earth appears to plunge into night every 45 minutes. Floating over the dark planet on a moonless night in a sky blacker than you thought possible, all the Earth might look like to you, says Nasa astronaut David Wolf, "is the absence of stars " You can reach into a shadow so black that your arm can appear to disappear."

Wolf went for a walk over the world from the Mir Space Station in the late 1990s and saw the Earth seemingly vanish. His recollection so moved New York-based artist Rachel Rose when she heard it on NPR that she went to considerable lengths to track him down for a personal retelling. "I sent handwritten letters, emails and cold-called any source I could find linked to him on the internet. I tried everything for around three or four months. I didn't think I would be able to get to him," she says.