A radically different approach to XR in festival, gallery, and museum is on at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, running through June 17th. For the first time, Tribeca’s Immersive offering is off-site at Mercer Labs, the newly-opened museum of art and technology, at 21 Dey Street in lower Manhattan.
Eight exclusive large-scale immersive artworks from six artists – Memo Akten, Wen-Yee Hsieh, ScanLAB Projects, Robertina Šebjanič, Liam Young, and Sutu – will rotate in Mercer Labs’ bespoke exhibition spaces in three presentations: Body In The World, Redesigning Tomorrow, and Far From Nature. Each piece represents a distinct creative style, originating from artists whose expertise spans architecture, film, animation, sculpture, theater, dance, music, and audio.
Body in the World is the program I experienced. It takes a little more than a hour to walk through the whole exibit. This collection is meant to explore “Our bodily relationship with the world.” It features Wen-Yee Hsieh, Invisible Them; Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter, Embodied Simulation; Robertina Šebjanič, CO_SONIC 38,144 km² (spatialized in 4DSOUND with MONOM); and Sutu’s While We WaitLiam Young, Planet City
Sutu’s piece, a video in glass infinity room,“While We Wait,” features the artist’s signature neon style.
In The Great Endeavour, to reach current climate targets, we must develop the capacity to remove existing carbon from the atmosphere at gigatonne scales. The Great Endeavour is to capture all this carbon and will involve the largest construction project in human history. In collaboration with a network of scientists and technologists, The Great Endeavour chronicles the design, construction, and drama of what will become this generation’s moon landing, our last great act of planetary transformation. Patrons walk into a six walled projection in an enormous room. Waves crash over us as the largest oil drilling platform in the world seems to be dragged by struggling tugboats through stormy seas.
The advantage that immersive installations have over VR is that approximately 1,000 people per hour can walk through the 36,000 sf space at Mercer Labs. Only a few dozen can see a VR experience each day. Tribeca Immersive is open Mon-Thurs from 11a-8pET; Fri from 11a-10pET; Sat 10a-10p; and Sun from 10a-8p ET. Get Tickets
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