In our last newsletter, we discussed the mind and body connection—the importance of incorporating our senses in everything we do.
This week, let’s explore that further by considering experiences.
How important are experiences? Experiences have the power to make us feel, to provoke our thinking, to challenge our eye. Whether they’re art installations, physical spaces, or simply visuals, they are triggers.
Here are four examples to consider. As you look at each, consider what the experience might create for you, the feelings, ideas, thoughts, and space:
How might these examples encourage you to seek or create more experiences?
Read more about each below:
“Measuring the Universe’ by Roman Ondak, 2009, Museum of Modern Art, NYC
A cross between a site-specific installation and an event open to everyone, the work begins as an empty white gallery. As visitors enter the room, they are invited to stand against the wall and have someone mark off their height and label it with their first name and the date of their visit. As the artist describes it: “Every visitor [who] enters my room is welcome to be measured. And participation of people is very spontaneous.”
Measuring the Universe took place over the course of nearly three months at MoMA, and the accumulation of thousands of measurements formed a thick, ragged black band that encircled the gallery walls. Ondák himself was the first to be measured. Some measurements fell significantly above or below the band’s borders, highlighting the presence of taller and shorter participants.
Like much of Ondák’s work, Measuring the Universe stems from his interest in blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. “The idea is taken from a habit of parents to measure children,” he explains, which he does in his own home with his two sons. “I was thinking about this very peripheral and marginal moment of everyday life to be expanded and…transformed to the context of the exhibition.” He was also thinking about how these marks of growth indicate time’s passage, and how as we age, our experience and understanding of time, and of the world itself, changes. As the title Measuring the Universe suggests, it is through our own scale that we measure the world.
The Heartbeat Library by Laura Imai Messina
On the peaceful Japanese island of Teshima there is a library of heartbeats, a place where the heartbeats of visitors from all around the world are collected. In this small, isolated building, the heartbeats of people who are still alive or have already passed away continue to echo.
Reading this book is a powerful experience in and of itself; the heartbeat library it shares is also thought-provoking: What might it mean to go listen to the heartbeats of others? To hear it? To feel it? To consider the people behind the sound waves? What about recording your own?
Alex Israel’s REMEBR, Gagosian Gallery, June-July 2024
Ever wondered what your life might look like flashing before your eyes? And if you shared this montage as a selection of images from your camera roll—publicly and without control over what exactly would be featured—might the experience make you feel vulnerable in a whole new way? Would it feel like performing karaoke, but in pictures instead of songs? Would you feel like the star of your own movie, or like an influencer posting an #ad? Like a gambler never knowing what card will be drawn next, or maybe even like an artist, exposing your self-portrait to the court of popular opinion?
I have over 100,000 photos and videos on my iPhone. The pocket-sized smart device reports on the weather and tracks my steps, but it’s also become an external hard drive for my brain—allowing me to create and store an ever-expanding abundance of content. I wanted to find an engaging (and maybe even exciting) way to enter the cloud and scroll through these mementos, but without literally having to scroll through them. The Apple Photos app sends me short edited clips culled from this database that, on occasion, remind, surprise, and move me. My goal in building REMEMBR was to create similarly poignant memories for myself and for others, but at a scale and with a degree of drama that ups the emotional stakes for everyone. Could it cover a lot more ground? Could it become exhilarating?”
Each two-minute super-memory created by REMEMBR is made possible with the aid of artificial intelligence. REMEMBR selects and combines multiple categories of each user’s content, edits and synchronizes it all to an infectious pop beat, weaves it together with colorful animation, and choreographs its presentation across seven large screens shaped after my Self-Portrait works.
Olivia Rose, Free Guided Walks Around New York City, featured in the New York Times, 4/21/25
Ms. Rose, 33, is an artist and designer from the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. She founded the plant design studio Original Rose in 2017.
Last August, she began hosting free guided walks around New York that explored both the city’s history and its local plants.
Ms. Rose hopes her walks will foster a more intimate relationship between New Yorkers and the overlooked vegetation that lives alongside them. “I like to think about it as, like, you’re just learning more about your neighbors,” she said.
How might these examples encourage you to seek or create more experiences?