What do robots, hydrangeas and space-age LED arrays have to do with a) soccer and b) Bob Marley? “Football Is Freedom,” the newest exhibition at Mercer Labs (21 Dey St.), threads that needle to entertaining results.
Curated by artist Roy Nachum and various members of the Marley family, the digital art museum’s new show repurposes many existing exhibits to fit its theme: “The raw emotion of the game, and the spirit of Bob Marley.” On face value, this seems like a strange fit — soccer is the most grass-roots of sports, its status as the world game guaranteed by the fact that it requires only a ball and something to use as a goal, while Marley’s Trenchtown origins and Rastafarian faith feel like a world away from the sleek, hi-tech environment of this museum. Can this possibly work?
As it turns out, the answer is “yes.” The results are often moving: take, for example, the “4DSound” room, which for this show features a setup that came from “[artist] Roy Nachum blindfold[ing] himself for seven consecutive days, using himself as a conduit to experience the world without sight.”
The result of this experience seems to be an empty room filled with the various sounds of a football match — the contact of ball on boot, the referee’s whistle, the heavy breathing of the players. As visitors sit down, the assorted sounds of a crowd fade into Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” except… wait, why does it sound so different?
It turns out, this really is a four-dimensional sound experience. The installation designers have isolated the various tracks of “Redemption Song” and then offset them in both space and time, setting them adrift to bobble on ebbing and flowing waves that crest and bounce off the room’s walls. Spatially, the tracks are panned around the two-dimensional stereo field; the third dimension of space is accessed via speakers mounted in the floor and ceiling.
Temporally, meanwhile, the various parts of the song drift in and out of sync with one another. One moment everything matches up and it’s the song you’ve heard a million times, the next the guitar track has lagged a second behind the vocals and it feels wrong (in a good way). This effect seems to be accentuated by the space itself — it could be that the separation is achieved entirely by the physical distance between the speakers playing each part, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. The effect is both disconcerting and intriguing, and above all, it’s just really clever.
Even in the rooms when the connection between theme and installation seems a little more tenuous, the digital museum’s trademark ingenuity makes the experience rewarding regardless. Take “Volumetric,” an immersive infinity room filled with a 3D LED array featuring a million individual diodes, which pulses to the sound of another Bob Marley track. It’s not quite as soccer-heavy as some of the other spaces, but the room is pretty incredible regardless.
Even for frequent Mercer Labs visitors, there are plenty of elements unique to this show. In the “Eco” room, for example, there’s a nifty live texture mapping setup where visitors can use crayons to color a cartoon footballer on a piece of paper, and then watch as their creation is scanned and projected onto a 3D model of the same character.
Fans of Mercer Labs, soccer and Bob Marley, or just folks looking for an immersive high-tech way to spend the afternoon will find a lot to enjoy. Grab your tickets here.
Tom Hawking is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor and football fanatic. Find him at his website.
photos: courtesy Mercer Labs
