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Mercer Labs’ newest room messes with your sense of direction, and that's on purpose.
Opening as part of the museum’s ongoing "Maestros and the Machines" on April 24, “The Engine” is a new installation tucked inside the Lower Manhattan museum’s tech-forward exhibition that is less about what you see and more about how you process it. Or, more accurately, how quickly you can’t.
Conceived and directed by artist Roy Nachum (the creative behind Rihanna’s Anti cover), the room is built to deliberately slow perception and destabilize orientation. Mirrored surfaces turn the space into pieces that reflect both the room and the people inside it, making the scale feel slippery. You’re can't quite tell where the walls end or how big the room actually is, but that’s entirely the point.
Surrounding it all is a continuous, large-format screen that wraps the space in shifting landscapes. The visuals evolve as patterns, particles and images repeat, then break, then reassemble into something slightly different. It’s not quite a loop and not quite linear either, which gives the whole thing a suspended feeling, like time is stretching just a little longer than usual.
That tension—between movement and stillness, clarity and confusion—is what defines “The Engine.” Within the broader exhibition, it functions as a sort of reset. Here, the sensory overload recalibrates and then you’re pushed back out into the rest of the show.
And that larger show is doing plenty, too. "Maestros and the Machines" imagines what history’s most iconic artists might have created with today’s technology, blending robotics, responsive environments and 4D sound into a series of interactive rooms. The project also brings in heavyweight collaborators, including producer Timbaland, along with design and audio partners like Bang & Olufsen and Teenage Engineering.
But “The Engine” stands out for dialing things inward instead of up. It’s immersive, yes—but also a little disorienting, a little meditative and just unstable enough to make you pause.