I recently visited and met up with two immersive tech colleagues, Meriko Borogove and Matthew Shaw, putting on this exhibition for the Tribeca festival at Mercer Labs, an exhibition space in Lower Manhattan by the World Trade Center stop that showcases immersive multimedia experiences like this LIDAR scanning timelapse project called Framerate Studios. An impressive, novel, and beautiful use of laser scanning tech that, according to their website, “bears witness to the flux of life on earth. Surrounded by shifting pointcloud landscapes, submerged in sound, we scale our perspective. Together we see the beautiful, creative, and destructive forces of nature and humanity.”
My visit to Mercer Labs and the immersive tech exhibition was a pretty personal and memorable experience. It reminded me of an adventurous, ambitious, and otherworldly expedition into the Blue Mountains that I took with Luke Farrer and an impressive team of Australian mountaineers, including Lucas Trihey. That project involved abseiling down three waterfalls, drinking directly from waterfalls, encountering some exotic and intimidating fauna (tiger snakes), and laser scanning a 1000-meter stretch of a slot canyon with a Leica P20.
Mercer Labs is the brainchild of Cooper Union alum Roy Nachum, the artist most commonly known for the cover art of Rihanna’s “Anti” album, and real estate developer Michael Cayre. The museum features 15 interactive exhibition spaces and is much more, shall we say, participatory (and I dare say whimsical) than your standard art museum. It is worth a look and provides insight into what is in store for consumers and creators of art and media.
