Beneath the floorboards of Chelsea Market, where a century-old boiler room once sat empty for decades, a new exhibit is about to plunge visitors hundreds of feet into the ocean's darkest, least-understood layer. Starting Saturday, ARTECHOUSE NYC will open Twilight Zone: Hidden Wonders of the Ocean, an immersive art-and-science experience built in direct collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that turns real deep-sea research into a glowing, 24-minute journey through the mesopelagic zone.
The show centers on the ocean twilight zone, the mesopelagic layer that sits hundreds of feet beneath the surface. According to the outlet, ARTECHOUSE's studio artists and Woods Hole scientists met weekly to develop the exhibition, with the studio team researching the twilight zone's creatures and the ecological challenges they face before translating that science into art. Chloe Myers, ARTECHOUSE's director of visitor experience, told amNY that marine organisms in that zone consume 25% to 30% of human-emitted atmospheric carbon, and that marine snow encapsulates carbon at the ocean bottom for hundreds of years.
That carbon-capturing role is not incidental to the exhibit's premise. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has separately found that the ocean twilight zone's biological carbon pump helps transport gigatons of carbon annually from the upper ocean into the deep sea, according to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution release. The same institution has described the mesopelagic zone as extending from roughly 650 to 3,300 feet beneath the surface and holding up to 95% of all fish biomass on Earth by weight.
A 24-Minute Night Compressed From a Real Migration
The exhibition's centerpiece, per amNY, follows diel vertical migration, the nightly movement of marine organisms toward the ocean's surface and back down into the depths, compressing a full 24-hour cycle into a 24-minute experience. ARTECHOUSE uses artistic animation throughout to communicate bioluminescence, which plays a pivotal visual role in the show, while phytoplankton form one of the brightest scenes in the experience and jellyfish add a flowing visual element through their movement, amNY reported.
Woven into the piece are real scientific tools rendered as interactive art. The exhibition includes environmental DNA sampling, sonar, and deep-ocean imagery, and it also features the Mesobot robot, according to amNY's reporting. Environmental DNA, or eDNA, sampling works by filtering seawater to collect microscopic skin cells, mucus and waste shed by marine life, allowing oceanographers to identify species without ever physically capturing them, per PBS News. Inside the exhibit, an eDNA installation shows visitors which organisms correspond to specific environmental DNA readings, amNY noted.
The Mesobot itself is a real research vehicle: a 550-pound hybrid autonomous underwater robot developed jointly by WHOI, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Stanford and UTRGV that can track delicate twilight zone organisms for more than 24 hours using non-disruptive red light and eDNA samplers, according to PBS News. Its design is intended to be unobtrusive while it tracks delicate twilight zone organisms.
Sound and Space Inside a Former Boiler Room
ARTECHOUSE NYC sits inside a roughly 100-year-old former boiler room beneath Chelsea Market, amNY reported, with the gallery offering visitors a panoramic immersion space. Other reporting has put finer numbers on that setting: the subterranean venue spans 6,000 square feet with 21-foot ceilings, according to Untapped New York, which noted the space sat vacant for decades before opening as a digital gallery in September 2019. Untapped New York also reported on the venue's visual technology.
That visual system is matched by a 32-channel spatialized audio space inside the New York facility, amNY reported, which in this exhibition carries an original composition by Mehmet Ünal of Tilde Sound Art. Every guest experience begins with a guided introduction, and the show's first installation offers a portal into real Woods Hole footage before the main animation begins, according to amNY.
From D.C. Debut to a Growing National Network
Twilight Zone: Hidden Wonders of the Ocean is not new to the ARTECHOUSE network. The exhibit first debuted at the organization's Washington, D.C. venue on September 14, 2024, before expanding to New York and Houston this September, according to BroadwayWorld. Hoodline previously reported on the flagship D.C. venue's reopening with its own ocean-themed digital show, and on a season-opening gala at ARTECHOUSE's Houston location.
ARTECHOUSE describes itself as an innovative artistic organization, and the exhibit connects the ocean twilight zone to climate, food webs and planetary health, framing a zone that is changing rapidly, amNY reported. The organization was founded by Sandro Kereselidze and Tati Pastukhova, who had previously launched the Washington, D.C. arts organization Art Soiree in 2009 before opening the nation's first permanent digital art space in 2017, according to blooloop. The Chelsea Market location inaugurated its space in 2019 with Refik Anadol's AI exhibition Machine Hallucination and has since hosted additional programming, per the same outlet.
The research underpinning the exhibit traces back to an Ocean Twilight Zone initiative by Woods Hole itself.
Twilight Zone: Hidden Wonders of the Ocean opens to the general public Saturday, September 19, at ARTECHOUSE NYC, located at 439 W. 15th Street in Chelsea, amNY reported. Tickets are available through artechouse.com's program page for the New York exhibit.
