The 2024 Tribeca Festival, presented by OKX, announced on May 21 its immersive lineup of world-class digital artists, presented in partnership with Mercer Labs and Co-Founder, artist Roy Nachum. Now in its 13th year, Tribeca Festival’s immersive exhibition runs June 6-17 at Mercer Labs, the newly-opened museum of art and technology, at 21 Dey Street in lower Manhattan. Purchase tickets here.
“At Tribeca, we’ve transformed our immersive offerings to meet the growing demand for expansive experiences,” Tribeca Co-Founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal was quoted as saying in a press release. “As artists transition from digital platforms to live audiences, we’ve embraced the opportunity to explore new avenues in immersive programming. Our curated showcase, in collaboration with Mercer Labs, features exclusive works from renowned artists across diverse disciplines. This marks a significant milestone in festival history and continues Tribeca’s commitment to innovation, creativity and technology.”
As Mercer Labs first guest-curated exhibition, Tribeca Festival’s program offers a collective experience of visual and sonic artworks, specifically curated for the unique architecture and state of the art technology of the space.
From June 6-17, eight exclusive large-scale immersive artworks from six artists – Memo Akten, Wen-Yee Hsieh, ScanLAB Projects, Robertina Šebjanič, Liam Young, 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.
“Never before has an immersive program at a festival undertaken such an endeavor to create multiple exclusive works at this scale and format,” Tribeca Immersive Curator Ana Brzezińska also was quoted as saying in a press release. “This year, our program is a response to the reality that constantly prompts us to reflect on our relationship with society, technology, the natural environment, and individual life experiences.”
Also quoted as saying in the press release was Mercer Labs Co-Founder and Artist, Roy Nachum: “The function of art is to see the world with new eyes; to motivate our community to consistently challenge and reinvent the world around us. Mercer Labs gives life back to the Museum experience, continuing the story and creating a new cycle.”
Invisible Them
The immersive program will be accompanied by a series of free artist talks and events at the Tribeca Festival hub at Spring Studios from June 6-8. Tribeca will also host the pilot edition of The Circle, a new incubator program designed to support top future digital talent through a network of industry associates including Accenture Song, ArtScience Museum Singapore, Cosm, EY Metaverse Labs, Google, Meta, MIT Open Documentary Lab, ONX Onassis Studio, PHI Center, Runway ML, ZeroSpace and more.
More information on Tribeca Festival immersive artists can be found below. For the latest updates on Tribeca Festival programming follow @Tribeca and #Tribeca2024 on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A Tribeca Membership and 2024 Tribeca Festival passes and ticket packages can be purchased at tribecafilm.com.
About Mercer Labs
It redefines the museum experience. Through 13 experimental exhibition spaces, interactive experiences, unique listening encounters and immersive installations the relationship between art and technology is redefined. Led by artist and Co-Founder Roy Nachum, the experimental institution stands at 36,000 square ft, located in the heart of downtown New York City. Where culture, and innovation converge with intention and art humanizes technology.
Mercer Labs challenges the format of a museum, hierarchies between art and its environment are dissolved. With every brushstroke of code and every meticulously designed interactive interface, we investigate uncharted territory.
Mercer Labs goes beyond conventional creative limitations, embracing change, innovation, and collaborations to pave the way towards a positive future. The museum fosters this exchange among artists through collaborations and curatorial programs. With Nachum’s on-site laboratory of master technical directors visions are brought to life.
2024 Tribeca Festival Partners
AT&T, Audible, Canva, CHANEL, City National Bank, Diageo, Easterseals Disability Services, Indeed, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, NBC4 and Telemundo 47, NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, National CineMedia, New York Magazine, Spring Studios New York, The Wall Street Journal, Variety, Vulture and WeTransfer.
2024 Tribeca Immersive Artists
Memo Akten, Embodied Simulation: A multi-screen video and sound installation that aims to provoke and nurture strong connections to the global ecosystems of which we are a part. The work combines artificial intelligence with dance and research from neuroscience to create an immersive, embodied experience, extending the viewer’s bodily perception beyond the skin, and into the environment.
Memo Akten is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician, and researcher investigating the intricacies of human-machine entanglements. His work explores perception and states of consciousness, and the tensions between ecology, technology, science and spirituality. He writes code and uses algorithmic / data-driven design and aesthetics to create moving images, sounds, large-scale responsive installations and performances.
He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London, specializing in artistic and creative applications of Artificial Intelligence, and he is currently Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. Akten has received numerous awards including the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.
Wen-Yee Hsieh, The Great Filter; The issue of identity between oneself and the environment has been interpreted as a world of its own. Catastrophes in the human world are translated into a sense of detachment between the self and the larger environment (from individual to collective, and beyond). It is the detachment from the real world that gives birth to a parallel imaginary space. However, when the real world permeates into this parallel world, conflicts arise.
Wen-Yee Hsieh is a Taiwanese artist who poses questions through digital graphics, photography, architecture design, and performing arts. His first VR experience, Limbotopia in VR, co-created with Chun-Lien Cheng, won the 2022 Anifilm International Festival Best VR Film Award and was nominated at the 2022 TRIBECA Festival and the 2021 Kaohsiung Film Festival.
Wen-Yee Hsieh, Invisible Them; For Invisible Them, the collective subconscious is spread out like a field of thoughts, preserved within the hallucinatory garden. Traversing the corridor of what constitutes the prototype hallucinatory garden, exploring the essence of collective violence, behavior, and fallacies. At the center lies an empty tomb; the niches on the wall are where consciousness is collected before it disperses, ultimately returning to the universe as energy.
Invisible Them
ScanLAB Projects, FRAMERATE: Rhythms Around Us: Bears witness to the flux of life on earth. Surrounded by shifting point cloud landscapes, submerged in sound, we scale our perspective. Together we see the beautiful, creative, and destructive forces of nature and humanity. We are a part of this rhythm, we contribute to the cacophony, we are in sync, and we catastrophically collide with the beating pulse of our planet.
ScanLAB Projects is a pioneering creative practice. They digitize the world using LiDAR, a form of machine vision they believe is the future of Cinematography. They use their craft as a way to bear witness to the world – collaborating with artists, performers, and scientists on evocative, meaningful stories.
Robertina Šebjanič, CO_SONIC 38,144 km² (spatialized in 4DSOUND with MONOM): A poetic reflection and AI-powered sound
landscape, artist Robertina Šebjanič explores the story of the coexistence of species and life forms through an observation of a river as one entity. The 4DSOUND adaptation for Tribeca Festival integrates the sounds of the Hudson River and bustling New York streets, blending them with the sonic presence of the more-than-human voices of natural and AI-generated entities from the Ljubljanica River and the Atlantic Ocean.
Robertina Šebjanič is an artist/researcher whose work explores the biological, (geo)political, cultural realities of aquatic environments and the impact of human activity on other organisms. She exhibited and performed at festivals and galleries worldwide including Ars Electronica, ZKM, KIKK Festival, Matadero, La Gaîté Lyrique, Le Cube, and was awarded at Prix Ars Electronica, Starts Prize, Falling Walls, Re: Humanism a.o.
Sutu, While We Wait: Delves into the paradoxical dynamics of modern connectivity. Amidst a backdrop of global pandemics, war or other physical world stressors, seeking solace as virtual avatars in digital communion, has become a necessary psychological outlet for many of us. Through vibrant hues and serene landscapes, the piece invites contemplation on the omnipresent chaos of real life and the promise of consolation in virtual spaces.
Sutu is an Australian digital artist and XR specialist who combines art and technology in new ways to tell immersive stories. His art explores themes surrounding the future of digital technology and culture, virtual identity and memory. He holds an Honorary Doctorate in Digital Media.
Liam Young, 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.
Liam Young is a designer, director and BAFTA nominated producer who is described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’. His visionary films and speculative world designs for the entertainment industry are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today.
Gregg W. Morris can be reached at gregghc@comcast.net, profgreggwmorris@gmail.com
Editor, Publisher Gregg W. Morris