MoMA Media Lounge. Designed by Renée Green

In parallel to a digitization initiative, I developed the MoMA Media Lounge, a modular, flexible display presenting the museum’s extensive collection of video- and audio-based works. The first public platform of its kind in a New York museum, the Media Lounge invited viewers to select artworks through an iPad interface and experience them with historically accurate display technology. Designed by artist Renée Green, the installation consisted of expandable or contractible environments for individual or shared viewing experiences.

Evoking histories of utopian forms, Green’s geometric design partnered a bold color palette with a range of textiles to create immersive structures that take on new meaning in concert with the videos on display. Green’s Media Bichos, as she referred to this work, can be related to Lygia Clark’s Bichos of the 1960s—geometric “creatures” with which visitors can interact to create multiple forms. Banners suspended overhead, referring to radical aspirations of the avant-garde and beyond, form Green’s Space Poem #3 (Media Bicho), adding another layer to her ongoing investigation of the ways in which viewers read and extract meaning from combined systems while moving through space.

Launched in conjunction with a collection-digitization initiative, the Media Lounge unfolded in three phases: Phase 1 presented three viewing stations in the second-floor corridor connecting the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Education and Research Building and the main Museum galleries. Phase 2 presented a total of seven viewing stations, including six cube monitors (for videos in 4:3 standard definition format) and one widescreen monitor (for videos in 16:9 high-definition format). Phase 2 also included a projection highlighting performance-based works at the end of the corridor. Phase 3 planned to expand to the vicinity of the second-floor Bauhaus Staircase. As more works from the collection are preserved and new videos are added to the collection, the Media Lounge should also be expanded.