NEW YORK, NY.- When the Dia Art Foundation invited Steve McQueen to create a work for its museum in Beacon, New York, the curators assumed that he’d propose a film or video project. It made sense: McQueen is the British director of the Oscar-winning best picture “12 Years a Slave” (2013) and other acclaimed movies such as “Hunger” and “Shame.” And long before that, he was a prominent contemporary artist known for experimental films with wildly varying themes, lengths and display methods, often in museum galleries.

In one notable work, “Western Deep” (2002), he immersed viewers in the experience of workers in a South African gold mine. The installation required a pitch-black screening room; the film began with a six-minute scene of the descent down the shaft.

Awarded the British pavilion exhibition in the Venice Biennale in 2009, he showed “Giardini,” a film on two large screens depicting the gardens that host national pavilions, but shot in the dead of winter, misty and gray, with scavenger dogs roaming and dim church bells in the distance.

The last time that Donna De Salvo, a senior adjunct curator at Dia, worked with McQueen, in 2016, she was chief curator at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, where they showed “End Credits.” It addressed the federal government’s surveillance and scrutiny of celebrated African American actor-activist Paul Robeson. Playing on two huge screens that faced each other across the museum’s empty fifth floor, it scrolled through redacted documents from Robeson’s FBI file. It ran nearly 13 hours.

But when McQueen visited Dia in 2021, he had other ideas. He turned up with a dictionary of color, De Salvo recalled in a phone interview. He talked about bass guitars. He requested the museum’s stark, 35,000-square-foot basement, with its 78 evenly spaced concrete columns.

“Bass,” which opens in Beacon on Sunday, is unclassifiable. An immersive environment. A dematerialized sculpture. You are in the basement. Above you, a field of 60 rectangular light boxes cycles through the visible spectrum from the edge of ultraviolet to nearly infrared. The state-of-the-art LEDs distill a shadowless light that also moves through certain shades such as cyans and magentas that your eyes perceive but your phone camera can’t differentiate.

From three speaker stacks emerges bass music, filling the room with thick grooves and abstract, spacey passages. It is a group improvisation by five musicians — on electric and acoustic bass and ngoni, a bass lute from West Africa — recorded in this space. The lights cycle 40 minutes and the music much longer, so the combination will be different on each visit.

There are no images. Made of work from light, music and space alone, “Bass” is arguably McQueen’s most abstract project, and certainly, in its realization, a new direction.

But its concerns go back some 20 years, McQueen said in a recent video interview from his home in Amsterdam.

“What I often do is plant seeds and certain things come into fruition, and other things wither and die,” he said. “And this one kept going.”

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One of his questions was about light itself — the beautiful, implacable science of it, how wavelengths and densities affect our perception.

“The multitude of strobes, certain kinds of reflections, things that absorb — those aspects interested me.” A physicist once showed him properties of color by hitting billiard balls and watching how the different colors traveled, he said. It brought home how “a sense of temperature, a sense of density of light hitting things,” are involved in making things visible.

The other part of his inquiry was Black diaspora history and its inescapable structuring moment, the Middle Passage. “The limbo, the stuff in between” the trans-Atlantic trade has long been on his mind, he said — not just the violence and horror but its psychological core, how for those who survived and their descendants, history proceeds from negation and removal.

“Black people are in some way post-apocalypse people,” McQueen said. His interest is in how self and community are recomposed in the long, multigenerational aftermath of such trauma.

For a nonmaterial piece, “Bass” (which is co-commissioned by the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel) offers plenty to chew on. By opening up space for associations, McQueen’s most abstract work may be one of his most fertile.

His preoccupation with the long trace of the Middle Passage echoes, notably, the framework of lauded scholar Christina Sharpe, who interprets Black life through stark but lyrical metaphors of transshipment — “the ship,” “the hold,” “the weather” — in her influential 2016 book, “In the Wake.”

Those who know his films, meanwhile, may relate the color bath to “Shame” (2011), his story of a sex addict in Manhattan played by Michael Fassbender, which for much of the movie seems awash in cold blue-gray; or to the six-minute experimental piece “Charlotte,” an extreme close-up soaked in red light of actress Charlotte Rampling’s eye.

As for the music, it prompted (in this viewer) memories of the ecstatic party scene in “Lover’s Rock,” one chapter in McQueen’s five-film series on the Black British experience in the 1970s, which premiered in 2020. (You can watch the series, titled “Small Axe,” on Amazon.)

Presented with this connection to the film, McQueen, who is not keen on trite interpretations, partly swatted it away. Though he is not a musician, his work with music goes beyond film scores. In 2019, for instance, he programmed the “Soundtrack of America” concert series at the Shed, in Manhattan, on the history of Black American music. “The electric bass changed music,” he recalled Quincy Jones stating plainly at the time — a nugget that lodged in his mind.

But McQueen also brought up how cultural theorist Stuart Hall spoke of the cathartic necessity of Black music and parties.

“Without those shebeens, those blues parties, there’d have been a psychosis,” McQueen said, paraphrasing Hall. “We needed these things.” In the parties’ confined space, “the bass, the sweat, took on a religious dimension. In those spaces things become experimental. There’s a necessity to venture and transcend.”

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A couple of months ago, the musicians on “Bass” gathered to record in the Dia basement. Half the lights were installed and running, and the group formed a circle in the middle of the room, with one — Meshell Ndegeocello, a Grammy-winning and genre-defying musician — at her own station some yards away.

The others — jazz veteran Marcus Miller, who organized the group; Aston Barrett Jr., son of reggae bassist “Familyman” Barrett; Mamadou Kouyaté, on ngoni; and Laura-Simone Martin, a young virtuoso on acoustic bass — improvised. Miller proposed riffs and guided the flow with hand movements. McQueen added his own gestures, cuing them to take their time.

“Steve wanted us to go beyond what we’re used to doing, in terms of the lengths of these grooves,” Miller said by phone from Los Angeles. “It was perfect, because this is a museum, where people can stare, focus and absorb. Now we have music that does the same thing.”

The core of “Bass,” ultimately, is a dialectic — the scientific properties of light versus in-the-moment perception and expression. The lights are uncanny: For long stretches you think they aren’t changing. But in fact their progression is linear and regular, from shortest to longest wavelength, said Randy Gibson, Dia’s manager of exhibition technology.

“We don’t pause on a color; it’s constant change,” Gibson said. “I think Steve wanted this destabilizing aspect. People’s responses to color areas are drastically different, and it changes how you experience the music.”

McQueen has made work using only light once before, albeit without music and in a very different setting. Back in 2012, in a public art project in Amsterdam organized by the Stedelijk Museum, he equipped all the street lamps in the city’s Vondelpark with blue filters that made the park dim and otherworldly every night for two weeks.

For De Salvo, McQueen’s work across forms evokes sculpture.

“If people look at the movies they’ll see the sculptural elements,” she said — notably in his famous long takes that linger on one scene. Of his fluency in feature and experimental film, and away from the camera, she added: “There are so few artists who are able to have these parallel practices.”

McQueen still can’t be boxed in. His latest release is “Occupied City,” a four-hour documentary that matches everyday scenes in Amsterdam today with narration of what happened at that site during the Nazi occupation: killings, deportations, betrayals, resistance. It is based on an atlas of the occupation of Amsterdam by his wife, Bianca Stigter, a Dutch journalist and historian.

He recently showed at London’s Serpentine Gallery a 26-minute film on Grenfell Tower, the apartment block in West London where a ghastly fire killed at least 72 residents (more, he says, as others were immigrants living in Britain without legal status) in 2017. It consists of a single long take from a helicopter — in itself a kind of improvisation, he said.

With “Bass,” however, there are no set historical or political cues. You can bring your own thoughts and find your own inspiration. That’s the power of abstraction, of course. The work has specific roots in Black history, but “I’m not trying to underline all that,” McQueen said. “It’s about exploration and experimentation, and where we can go from here.”

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‘Bass,’ by Steve McQueen: Through April 14, 2025; Dia Beacon, 3 Beekman St., Beacon, New York; diaart.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.