In the Shtick of It

For those who take interest in the evolution of that strange architectural genus known as the “immersive exhibition,” New York in the 2020s must feel the same as the shores of the Orinoco felt to early nineteenth-century botanists. You can’t cross town without fishing some new species out of your waders. I spotted one just yesterday, advertised on the subway’s blinding display screens. Balloon Story New York: A Whimsical Journey through a Balloon Wonderland. POV footage sped through varicolored chambers of over 600,000 balloons at the Park Avenue Armory, promising “Innovative Artistry” and “Joy for All Ages.” I had to use my phone to verify that this was not its near cousin, the Balloon Museum, at Seaport’s Pier 36. The Museum closed in January. The Story, improbably, was a creature of its own.

The appeal of “immersive experience” has long puzzled me, particularly in a city where daily life is filled with experiences as inescapably immersive as a ride on the Q train. But despite my curiosity toward these art-gallery-meets-VR extravaganzas, I have kept my distance and observed their proliferation with a careful, sidelong gaze. Truth is, I’m uneasy about how smoothly these ventures lend themselves to my cynicism about the harms that tech has wrought on our world. My cynicism is, I contend, well founded, but it is also so well rehearsed as to be tiresome.

Then I found Dream House. A friend of a friend had led me there, to the oldest and most technologically primitive of the so-called immersive exhibitions in New York. (Devotees of Dream House may object to my lumping it in with the new crop of for-profit enterprises, but I believe they are meaningfully connected, as much by their continuities as by their differences.) The experience shook me. I left with my bones a-buzzing. So affected was I that I got to wondering whether there might be more to the immersive exhibition than the familiar critiques (of capital, of the algorithm, of the metastasizing attention economy) would have me believe. In the proper context, might these most disdained of cultural destinations disclose some neglected human desire? Might they reveal, beyond further evidence of the catastrophe of the present, some kernel of wisdom for the future?

Such questions begged for genealogical thinking. As it happens, following the New York City immersive exhibition from its earliest recognizable forebearer to its flashiest and most highly capitalized contemporary specimen requires a mere fifteen-minute walk along Church Street.

Almost nothing about Tribeca’s nonprofit Dream House has changed since avant-garde composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela rigged the one-bedroom apartment above their home with gel lights, mirrors, and a veritable Four Horsemen set of UREI Model 820 stereos. (A version of Dream House premiered in Munich in 1969; since then, it has had over forty iterations between New York and Europe.) The Tribeca installation happened back in 1993, long before Hall des Lumières and its photogenic kin annexed every Instagram reel and bus stop kiosk. Dream House was “immersive” before immersive was everywhere.

On my visit, I buzzed into an unassuming brick mixed-use building at 275 Church Street, stepped over a stack of Amazon packages, and climbed two flights of sagging stairs. At the landing, a shoe rack and a low shelf of CDs signaled my arrival. The paper sign on the door read, “No phones, no talking.” With a nod to the wan attendant sitting before her open laptop, I slipped off my shoes, set my phone on airplane mode, and opened the door to a faceful of magenta light and bone-rattling sound.

Dream House does a lot with a little: The “house” consists of two small rooms linked by a hallway, with a bathroom at the rear. In the front room, which has a carpeted floor and a handful of pillows for sitting (I got cozy on one of these), two pairs of clunky overhead stage lights flood the space in saturated reds and purples. A set of twisty mobiles cast pink and blue shadows on the wall, as if a gender reveal party were sealed inside Schrödinger’s box.

But it was the noise that struck me. To enter Dream House is to be walloped by Young’s thirty-two-tone sine-wave composition, the title of which is 105 words long. (Zazeela’s luminous contribution is simply titled Light.) In keeping with Young’s minimalist bent, the piece comprises a single set of frequencies that resonate for years on end. This music (if you can call it that) doesn’t move. Yet the unwavering intensity of the sonic blast and the careful arrangement of the speakers produce an unseen topography of sound, across which the slightest change in position produces, to the listening ear, a dizzying babel. Without straying from my floor pillow, and by inclining my head a mere inch or so in any direction, I could discern a jackhammer, a chugging engine, cicadas, a pipe organ, a bolt rifle, and a passing train. Only afterward, when I stepped into the relative quiet of lower Manhattan, could I relish the paradox: Dream House never changes, but it can never be experienced the same way twice.

My second stop on that Church Street stroll was Mercer Labs Museum of Art and Technology, which at first glance might pass for the slicker, upscale grandchild of Dream House. Mercer Labs opened in February of 2024 in the shell of a Century 21 department store (an apt synecdoche for the broader shift from a retail to an experience economy) as a collaboration between artist Roy Nachum and überwealthy real estate developer Michael Cayre. Like every one of the gazillion other for-profit immersive exhibitions in this city, Mercer makes the dubious claim of “[transforming] the museum experience.” The copy on its website elaborates: “Through fifteen experimental exhibition spaces, interactive experiences, unique listening encounters, and immersive installations, the relationship between art and technology is redefined.” Cayre’s admission to the Times feels more honest: “It’s really a lot more than just an immersive space…. We’re actually working on collaborating with many, many different luxury brands in the market to basically take the space and with a click of a button, we can change the entire content of the museum to be whatever brand we want for that particular time.”

Mercer Labs does a little with a lot. I forfeited $52 to enter its circular anteroom, which smelled like a blend of Chanel No. 5 and sweet tobacco vape juice. As I slipped gauze booties over my shoes, two young women with clunky smartphones struggled to film the first attraction on the ceiling above us: a roiling, psychedelic projection that brought to mind Refik Anadol’s 2022–23 Unsupervised installation at MoMA.

This fragrant foyer led into the dark of the main hall, where a crashing musical soundtrack accompanied a 360-degree light show that darted around the lofty space and almost, almost created the illusion of depth. I reclined on a chunky seat of foamy stuff, then, considering how many strangers had done the same, decided to stand, thank you very much. Up high on the side walls, computer-generated cherry blossoms swayed with the unnerving conviction of digital images trying desperately to be lifelike. When, with a crescendo, the trees shed their pink petals, the dreamy scene transmuted into a churning bubbly eruption (popcorn? sand? Dippin’ Dots?) through which a giant dove flew in slo-mo, the whoosh of its wingbeats pumped into the room by unseen subwoofers. After a few minutes, the loop began anew, and I felt my way toward the curtained exit.

Next up: the I See Sound installation. This room—home to one of only three “large-scale 4D SOUND systems” in the world, Nachum has explained—boasts “an advanced setup of omnidirectional speakers and vibroacoustic transducers underneath the floor.” I See Sound was blue-lit, with steam hissing from the padded walls and people lying about like hydroponic plants beneath the private grow light of their phone screens. Hans Zimmer–like groans issued from beneath my feet. (As I listened to the soundscape—which, unlike Young’s static frequencies, lurched around somewhat—I noticed, with some pleasure, that the carpet here was nearly identical to the one in Dream House.) Later, in the basement, I watched a KUKA Robot Arm raking sand behind a wall of thick glass. But my interest waned when I began to suspect that the mechanical hums and whirs on my side of the pane were being fed to me, once again, by hidden speakers.

Of the fifteen “experimental” spaces in Mercer Labs, the Dragon Room most clearly telegraphs the museum’s mimetic ambitions. Chances are you’ve seen it on Instagram: mirrored walls expanding outward into infinity and a dizzying matrix of hanging LEDs create the impression of a hovering, cosmic object. (On my visit, it was a charging bull.) The vast, iterative architecture, the illusion of depth, the glassy surfaces—if the inside of my iPhone were a room, I imagine this is how it would feel. All it takes to break the spell is a spot of gum on the floor.

In no time at all, the docents beckoned me onward, again, through another curtained entryway, down a shabby black corridor, and toward the next contorting spectacle … but first let me linger here, in the liminal zone. The palpable lack of attention paid to these dim transitional stairs and hallways seems indicative of the project’s deep indifference toward space in general. In both the destination rooms and the in-between ones, physical architecture is not only an afterthought but a thing to be actively ignored, even disavowed. I began to suspect that if they could swing it, the creators of Mercer Labs would eschew the troublesome solidity of a building altogether and take their show to, I don’t know, the exosphere, or maybe the bottom of the ocean. Pure experience, they seem to suggest, has little truck with something so finicky as a room. Still, I persevered: through a gift shop hawking luxury water bottles and cute, little 3D printers and on to the street, where I blinked in the light, then set off downtown feeling unaccountably sad.

It’s easy enough to think of Dream House and Mercer Labs as two points in a shared genealogy: Both use light and sound to create exceptional experiences of space. They are, in this sense, architectural interventions that leave walls and floors intact. But whereas Dream House embraces the generative constraint of its four walls, Mercer Labs goes to phenomenally elaborate lengths to convince visitors they are not just in some old department store. In this respect, the pair appear to be from different worlds.

And in a way, they are. One predates the popular internet, the other is unintelligible without it. The opposition between their respective attitudes toward physical space reveals, I think, an important and neglected desire.

Conversations about immersive exhibitions are conversations about the internet—or, rather, the world that the internet has brought into being. In this world, every investment vehicle is wrapped with a tech veneer, the pressures of the attention economy threaten to colonize our sleep, soulless Instagram traps are given run over urban real estate, and the distinctions between “high” and “low” culture have been flattened into a vast, beige middle. Ventures such as Mercer Labs are guilty of all this. But these critiques ignore the meaningful tension between the two kinds of space (physical versus digital) most of us now inhabit and the two kinds of design (architectural versus UX) that give these spaces form.

It’s worth taking seriously what these flashy new attractions capitalize: the desire to reify the spatial logics of our digital lives. There are good reasons we might hope to inhabit three-dimensional shared spaces whose architecture (infinite, Borgesian) and phenomenology (interactive images, blinking lights) affirm the UX of the digital constructions where we spend so many of our waking hours. Though it may be an unimpressive and cynical cash grab, Mercer Labs marks a sincere effort to reconcile these distinct spatial logics. In seeking to inhabit two kinds of space simultaneously, we want to be assured that both our physical and our digital worlds are real.

Is bridging this gap worth our while? Can our overtaxed brains take the strain? It’s hard to say. But the rise of immersive exhibitions and the countervailing calls to refashion the internet with more democratic and sociable spatial arrangements suggest that we cannot solve the problems of physical and digital space independently. Architects are accountable to the desires engineered by UX designers, and coders must take seriously the politics of the commons. As the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “If justice is embodied, it is then therefore always spatial.” And if justice is spatial, it is both kinds of spatial. Indeed, the near-impossible demands of bridging physical and digital space prefigure the demands of justice, which are nothing less than the effort to join two worlds that obey fundamentally different logics: the world we’re in and the one we dream of.