One of the great surprises for first-time visitors to the National Gallery is discovering Leo Villareal’s “Multiverse,” a light installation in the walkway between the East and West Buildings.

The piece, which was installed in 2008, has 41,000 LEDs that span the 200-foot-long tunnel. Villareal programmed the software to create “abstract configurations” that are unlikely to repeat during a viewer’s walk. “Still, the eye will seek patterns in the motion, a perceptual effect of the hypnotic trailing lights,” the Gallery says.

So when Florida-based photographer and filmmaker Seamus Payne was in town to shoot projects for his website, TheCoolist.com, he paid the tunnel a visit. Using a DSLR and a tilt-shift lens, which he attached to the walkway’s moving rail, he rode along for two hours. “The result was fluid, slow-paced and admittedly hypnotic,” Payne says.