This Mercer Labs room will mess with your sense of reality

"Mirrored surfaces turn the space into pieces that reflect both the room and the people inside it, making the scale feel slippery. You can't quite tell where the walls end or how big the room actually is, but that's entirely the point."

"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."

The Engine is a new immersive installation within Mercer Labs' Maestros and the Machines exhibition, designed by artist Roy Nachum. The space uses mirrored surfaces to distort scale and disorient visitors, making it impossible to determine the room's actual dimensions or where walls end. Continuous large-format screens wrap the space with shifting landscapes of patterns, particles, and images that evolve without forming clear loops or linear progressions. This creates a suspended temporal feeling where movement and stillness, clarity and confusion exist in tension. The installation functions as a sensory reset point within the broader exhibition, which explores how historical artists might have created using contemporary technology, incorporating robotics, responsive environments, and 4D sound.

Read at Time Out New York