Dreamlands

This was probably my favorite exhibition of 2016. I was not prepared for what I saw when I walked into the Whitney’s meatpacking building, which I had never been to before. I honestly don’t know where to start, and I will be visiting Dreamlands again before the holidays as I didn’t have time to get a good look at everything in this immense curation. The way the rooms in which every video work was presented became part of the viewing experience was absolutely staggering. I felt like some sort of cyberpunk explorer, which was very exciting. Every video installation became bigger, and pieces that I would have overlooked in another context became instantly captivating. My favorite piece was Ben Coonley’s 360 degree video “Trading Futures,” and I honestly don’t have the words to express how incredible this 3D experience was for me. All in all, Dreamlands challenged the way I think about video art in our time. It took video experience out of my phone screen and breathed new life into my preconceptions of digital media. Now more than ever, physical installations are necessary to differentiate video experiences from one another. In this time of sensory and information overload, the space in which multimedia is consumed becomes increasingly important. Dreamlands made me think about how surprising it is that we had to reduce video into bites of disposable information in order to fully realize how important viewing spaces are to the overall experience of media consumption. I hope that this way of presenting video art becomes widespread.