www.livedesignonline.com: During the past week, I engaged in a binge-visit marathon and attended five of the new pop-up environments located in New York. My aim was to experience the role that technology has in this quickly expanding market catering to the Instagram-hungry public always eager to capture themselves in noteworthy, quirky, or hyped environments. While the technology was certainly present, front and center, the most significant element of these endeavors is the real estate factor.
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I understand now why the world of immersive installations can be so appealing to the fad, Instagraming group of young adults. Not only do most of the experiences described by the author in this article sound amazing to see, but some of them are so pretty to photograph. ZeroSpace sounds like the best one out of all of them to me, and it might just be because of the LED Spanish-esque like moss hanging from the ceiling. I love immersive installations that I can go to, sit down on the ground, and just watch the beauty. The Renwich Gallery in D.C. has a main installation exhibit that is like this. A vast room with a multicolored net hung on the ceiling, for people to take amazing pictures of, but also to lie underneath and just take some time out of the day to enjoy. VR also seems to be making more and more of the news lately with so many unique ways it has been used in theater, gaming design, and entertainment. I would love to do the Museum of Future Experiences, even if the attendant in a white lab coat gives me the hee-bee jee-bees.
Personally I’m all for empty and practically abandoned real estate space to be converted into affordable and rent controlled housing in cities such as New York and San Francisco with major housing crises, but this is ok too. I find the emphasis on media in these to be particularly interesting, but I do love that the author, Weisberg, seemed to enjoy the experiences with live human interaction to be more enjoyable, whether that was with actors or fellow audience members. I think it’s important to remember that story telling is an inherently human thing to do, and to take humans out of story telling often leaves a gap of desire within the people trying to consume the story. These pop ups not only give a chance for incredible media to be used, but I appreciate the trans-dimensional being “from the dimension of Sophomore, adjacent to the NYU Helix” that Weisberg mentions. Giving the performers opportunities to perform, hopefully with pay, and in this case definitely for the educational experience of mask work, is not a bad thing to have.
Art installations. Experiential art. The combination of the two and more are highlighted in this article with the common theme of technology being its creation and projection being the experience. Of course, this also includes sound, etc from installation to installation. I find that words don’t often accurately describe things like this because it is an experience. Experiences usually bring out emotions and emotions are much more complex and specific than we have words for. Elaborating on the use of words we have things like happiness. Everyone know what happiness is and what it feels like but an experience like this would bring out a particular happiness type feeling and emotion that may be like a wedding day happiness or could be like a the happiness you feel after knowing you did the right thing letting someone go. We don’t have words or even descriptive accuracies that could reflect what someone truly feels. This is why experiences are so powerful, it has to be felt and that is what makes this art something that should be seen.
Living in New York City over the summer, the social media bug that knows where you are and what you hear put tons of advertisements for these insta-worthy immersive environments on my feeds. And I did look at a few of their websites and was suspicious if they were really as cool as they advertised to be. I guess some of suspicions were true: there are college drama students enthusiastically interacting with audience members (if that is even the right term to call these participants) and a hotspot for video and media equipment to be shown off. It is cool to see that some of these spaces had genuinely interesting storylines – more than just a surface level plot to cover up the excuse to use VR or a LED ceiling. However, I wish that these surprising and other-worldly pop ups had affordable ticket prices. The technology showcased in them are very cool, but it would be cooler if there was a chance for more people to be able to experience them in action.
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