By Sunday, young Brooklynites and families alike grazed casually between galleries on their way to see large-scale Studio works like Life on Mars Revisited by David Bowie, Mick Rock and Barney Clay. After taking the elevator up to the 9th floor, they waited excitedly, not really minding the amusement park-worthy lines. Inside the installation room, “the freakiest show on Earth” began. Lasting just under five minutes, Rock’s remixed footage for Bowie’s “Live on Mars” took visitors on a thrilling and at times mildly terrifying ride, spinning them around and spit them back out, leaving their skin tingling with the suspicion that Bowie may have been breathing down their necks the whole time.
Photo by James Medcraft.A less unsettling but no less affective emotional experience could be found at A Physical Manifestation of Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, the joyous and uplifting installation conceived by Jonathan Glazer and J. Spaceman with Undisclosable and One of Us. As visitors walked in through the pitch-black hallway skirted by silvery sheaths, ambient noise from the Spiritualized track “Ladies and Gentleman, We Are Floating in Space” played on loop in the background. Inside the main chamber, four “windows” in the ceiling streamed in pools of light through the smoky air and high-tech directional speakers rigged above each window projected mini-loops of specially mixed stems of the song seemingly through the streams of light. People gazed up at the warm light or lay beneath the windows, quieted, enlightened and washed over with a sense of tranquility. Leaving the installation was hard, it was like bowing out of a sanctuary that could make every fear, every concern, every negative vibe you’ve ever encountered melt away.Photo by James Medcraft.United Visual Artists’ Origin (still on view from 5-9 PM until October 23rd), was by far the most accessible, as its location inside Tobacco Warehouse allowed many people to view at once… not that the blinking LED cube was an easy sight to miss. As the largest responsive work they’ve ever created, UVA wanted to channel the energy of New York in the mood of the piece, which came through in the frenetic pace of the lighting and the discombobulated, sampled score by Scanner. Read more about Origin’s origin here.Photo by Bryan Derballa.Over at 55 Washington (which was also a music venue) we exhibited our more playful and interactive works like DisKinect the Kinect-controlled puppet by Team DisKinect, Zigelbaum + Coelho‘s pixel wall Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, Super Pong by SuperUber, SOFTlab’s pair of kaleidoscopic structures R&Dazzle and our #creators Instagram wall by Social Print Studio.Photo by Bryan Derballa.Cantoni & Crescenti‘s gigantic undulating floor piece Soil and U-Ram Choe’s Venus Flytrap-esque mechanical flower Urbanus Female, held their own own over at 30 Washington and Powerhouse Arena, respectively, while Minha Yang‘s action-triggered Meditation installation and Quayola’s tinkering, undulating Strata #4 drew crowds to 81 Front Street. The other installations on display were an excerpt of Black Dice’s Jumbletron, originally exhibited at Coachella and set to a brand new score by Animal Collective, and the tongue-in-cheek “antagonistic app” Freefall Highscore by Antagonistic Applications, which encourages people to dream up creative ways to protect their phones while tossing them from high places.For those who didn’t get to see everything, check out the slideshow above. Find more background on the installations here. Share your own experiences with the works in the comments below…
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