An Instagram-ready immersive museum uses Braille. But is it accessible?

While settling in Manhattan after moving from Israel in 2004, the 24-year-old artist Roy Nachum decided to take on a second challenge: inspired by his grandmother who had lost her sight, and looking for new inspiration for his artwork, he blindfolded himself. For the next 168 hours, he felt his way around his East Village apartment, using a walking stick to navigate to and from the nearby grocery store.

That experience of being overwhelmed by the sounds and chaos of a new city helped inspire the exhibitions in his new immersive installation, Mercer Labs. It opened for previews in January in a 31,000-square-foot space in a sleek brutalist-style building at 21 Dey Street — the site of the former Century 21 department store.

Nachum, whose artwork often included Braille, became famous designing the Grammy-nominated cover for Rihanna’s album ‘Anti’ featuring a photo of Rihanna as a child wearing a braille-embossed gold crown. He and real estate developer Michael Cayre founded Mercer Labs with an ambitious mandate: to be a “place where the traditional hierarchies between art, architecture, design, technology and culture are dissolved,” and where “diversity and inclusivity are celebrated,” according to a press release. The site is expected to officially open on March 28.

The founders advertise Mercer Labs as a “museum of art and technology.” It currently contains 14 exhibition spaces that use high-tech projectors, digital screens, LED lighting and sound systems to display Nachum’s perception-stimulating creations. Some exhibits include braille, tactile displays and immersive sounds intended for blind and visually impaired visitors, as well as sighted visitors. In one of the rooms, visionary visitors can put on sleep masks and listen to a series of immersive sounds so they can better understand Nachum’s 2004 experiences with touch and navigation. In yet another space, guests stroll through a cave covered in pink hydrangeas that can be explored by touch.

Nachum’s installations are currently on display, but when Mercer Labs officially opens in March, Nachum and Cayre want to make it a multi-functional venue, with exhibitions by other artists, musicians and even actors; event spaces that can be rented for private use; and displays highlighting fashion brands and emerging New York companies. They wouldn’t discuss the specific brands or artists they work with, citing non-disclosure agreements.

“It’s really much more than just an immersive space,” Cayre said. “We’re working on working with a lot of different luxury brands in the market to basically take over the space and with the click of a button we can change the entire contents of the museum to whatever brand we want for that specific time. .”

Nachum was born in Jerusalem in 1979 to a father who was a painter and a mother who was a kindergarten director. Nachum grew up painting. When he was a child, his grandmother developed a rare, debilitating disease that left her weakened and blind – a traumatic experience that Nachum says inspired him to use Braille in his artwork.

He eventually moved to the United States to study art at Cooper Union. After graduating, he began selling his art on the streets of New York until he was introduced to Rihanna, who commissioned a series of Braille paintings, including the now famous album cover. That image became one of Nachum’s signature designs and appears repeatedly at Mercer Labs.

Cayre is an art collector and ultra-wealthy real estate developer whose family owns Midtown Equities, an investment firm with more than 100 properties in New York, Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

The two met in Soho through a mutual acquaintance, and Cayre collected some of Nachum’s works. They later traveled together to Tokyo, where they visited the famous immersive installations created by Japanese technology art collective teamLab, which inspired them to join the fast-evolving immersive experience trend. In the United States, it included Meow Wolf, with extravaganzas in Santa Fe, Las Vegas and Denver, and Superblue, which opened in Miami in 2021. (Predecessors include James Turrell’s Skyspaces and Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s field”, in 1965.) The pandemic took its toll on enterprising investors, but immersives have proven globally resilient.

Nachum and Cayre originally planned to open their Brooklyn location, but the pandemic put the project on hold. When Century 21, in the Financial District, went bankrupt, Cayre drew up a plan for a $35 million renovation of the property.

Cayre and his family remain Mercer Labs’ primary backers, saying it has sold more than 50,000 tickets since its soft opening in January. (Adult tickets cost $52; student, senior and youth tickets are $46.)

In addition to collaborating with luxury brands, Nachum also hopes to collaborate with other artists, musicians, poets, actors and architects. A private area of ​​Mercer Labs features an art studio with 3D printers and computers, as well as oil paints, crayons, canvases and other physical and digital art instruments. New exhibitions arrive at Mercer Labs in May, June and July, including an exhibition focusing on poetry.

“For me it’s about creating a movement,” Nachum said.

On a Thursday in January, Nachum, who has curly brown hair and wore a black tracksuit, showed up at the entrance to Mercer Labs to take a reporter on a tour. His demeanor was serious as he showed the first installation, a circular room called The Window, in which visitors put plastic covers over their shoes and a ceiling screen displays an undulating object resembling a deformed seashell.

The next room, a 5,000-square-foot space with 40-foot ceilings, uses 26 projectors to display varying, twisted images from Nachum’s artwork: a giant bird flapping its wings, a waterfall of petals, a person who wears a crown with braille am working on it.

Many of the Braille messages contain lofty statements: “All people are born equal in dignity and rights,” reads one.

“Braille is a recurring motif in my work, a tribute to people who are visually impaired, both tactilely and through light. From a light source, it is a metaphor and a tool to create awareness,” Nachum wrote in an email.

“I wanted to do work that talked about equality,” he said. “Because everyone deserves to experience art and visual arts.”

Some of the braille messages appear on screens that are not accessible to the blind or are projected on the ground. Some advocates for blind people say this use of Braille feels exploitative and could perpetuate hurtful stereotypes about blind people.

“Blindness is a complex human experience and not an appropriate vehicle for metaphors of ignorance or perception,” said Chancey Fleet, president of the Assistive Technology Trainers Division of the National Federation of the Blind. “While I am always excited to see authentic representations of blind people and braille in art, using braille as a means to create an experience of readability is a cheap trick and not a favor to the blind community.”

According to the Mercer Labs website, the image of a child wearing a golden crown symbolizes “the ‘blindness’ born of displaced values ​​and desires.” But associating blindness with negative ideas can be problematic, he says Cheryl Fogle Hatcha researcher at New York University’s Ability Project.

“For me, blindness is a specific physical characteristic,” she said. “It’s the way I experience the world. It’s the way I will always experience the world. It has no bearing on my moral conduct.”

Nachum said he has worked and collaborated with visually impaired people for 20 years Lighthouse Guild, an organization that provides services to the blind. He also referred to a series of five collaborative paintings shown in 2023 by Mayor Eric Adams of New York in the City Hall Rotunda, in which he painted portraits of blind people and then invited them to paint over the portraits. These paintings will be displayed in a new exhibition opening soon at Mercer.

He said he recently installed signs with descriptions in Braille in front of each exhibit.

“We built this museum so that everyone can experience art,” he said. “You can touch everything.”

Mercer Labs has already generated a lot of buzz on social media, with more than 30,000 followers for its Instagram account. On a recent Saturday, visitors spent much of their time on their phones taking photos of the exhibits or posing for photos. With its sparkling, colorful lights, its many mirrors, and its otherworldly imagery, Mercer Labs feels designed for virality on TikTok and Instagram.

The exhibit that has caused a stir online is the mirrored Dragon Room, in which more than 500,000 tiny LED lights, controlled by a sophisticated computer program, dangle from the ceiling. Shimmering and constantly changing, they create what Nachum calls ‘volumetric lighting’, or the feeling of walking through a hologram.

In another exhibit, visitors can type a wish into a computer and then enter a room with a series of tubes that zoom their wish, symbolized by a brightly lit object, around the room.

Immersive installations like Mercer Labs are often more about using technology to create something visually stunning than about spotlighting specific artists, says Sarah Rothberg, assistant art professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“It’s really all about the spectacle and taking a picture of it while you’re in it,” she said.

Parth Patel, 28, and Sonia Sabade, 29, visited Mercer for their one-year anniversary as a couple after hearing about it on TikTok. They left amazed at some of the displays.

“They were very sensory, with sound, light, even fog and textural experiences,” Sabade said. “Now I understand why they call these immersive experiences.”