Illumination.NYC '25 – SENSORIUM
Glimmer Labs brought the SENSORIUM to the newly renovated Robert Wagner Park in Battery Park City, NYC for Illumination NYC- a prestigious festival featuring 11 of the top light artists from around the world.
Illumination NYC is an outdoor four-day light art festival in New York City with a audience of 14,000+ people with a mission to display large scale public free celebrations of light.
With the larger audience in mind, we streamlined The Sensorium design by obtaining a round 30' tent, arranging the LED tubes in a spiral pattern, and mounting wires, power supplies, and decoder devices at the top of the tent on a wood platform.
The wood platform also held different sized disco balls on spinners and (3) color changing pin spot lights that created a slow but dynamic play of brilliance on the tent ceiling. The processing device lived on the floor near the center pole and ran the custom software for the lights to react to the preprogrammed music. Inflatable cushions ringing the perimeter provided comfortable seating for folks to spend time enjoying the music and exciting visual display.
At its core, The SENSORIUM is an experiment in presence. We live in a time where attention is fragmented, where our senses are pulled in a thousand directions at once. Here, we aim to reweave them together. The downtempo soundscape grounds the body, while flowing light art stimulates the eyes in waves of rhythm and symmetry. Subtle tactile elements—the texture of fabric, the softness of cushions, the warmth of bodies gathered together—remind us of our skin’s intelligence. Gentle prompts for taste and scent occasionally surface, encouraging deeper awareness of how interconnected the senses truly are.
The SENSORIUM offered a magical respite of light and sound amidst the flow of thousands of nightly visitors to Wagner Park on the New York City waterfront, with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island as a backdrop.
This tent is not a performance to watch, but an atmosphere to enter. It is a sanctuary for stillness in the midst of chaos, a place where people can slow down, recalibrate, and explore how perception shapes emotion. We are less interested in dazzling the senses than in heightening them—illuminating the small, often overlooked ways they blend into one another to form the fabric of human experience.
The SENSORIUM is part light art installation, part communal retreat, and part dream. It belongs to everyone who steps inside and adds their own energy to the mix. Together, we create the living pulse of the space.