Now you see art. Now you don’t.

On a hot June afternoon, Emma Enderby, curator warehouse Cecilia Al Yamani, Director and Chief Trustee high line drawing, they walked side by side between their guard offices on Manhattan’s West Side, tracing the layout of their first cooperative gallery.

They were jubilant.

“There is no installation overnight,” Al Yamani said. “There are no cranes. its the best. “

Nothing will be decided before the opening. “We didn’t have to think about the geometry or the weight loads,” Enderby said. “You can just have a quiet day putting it on.”

The “Looking Glass” exhibition, taking place from Saturday to August 29, is an exhibition in which all “they” – the sculptures on display – are virtual, only present in augmented reality, or AR.

Using an app developed by Acute Art, a London-based digital art organisation, a viewer can point a phone at a QR code displayed on a site – a sign to “hide” a virtual artwork. The code activates a specific statue that appears on the viewer’s camera screen, superimposed on the environment. (Unlike virtual reality, or VR, where the viewer wears a device, such as goggles, augmented reality does not require full immersion.) Most of the virtual artwork will be located in the plaza surrounding the penthouse, on West 30th Street at 11th Avenue, complemented by three locations on a line High line nearby.

Akut Art is overseeing the gallery’s third curator, Daniel Birnbaum, who has only been able to be there from a distance due to the pandemic. ‘The Looking Glass’ is an updated and expanded revival of another edgy art gallery, ‘Unreal City’, which opened in London’s Southbank last year and then, facing the lock of New Precisions, reappeared in a month-long home edition. A teaser, featuring three artists from “The Looking Glass,” was released last month at Frieze New York at The Shed.

“There is something beautiful about being completely secret or invisible,” Birnbaum said in a phone interview. “It is a completely invisible sight until you start talking about it.”

If “The Looking Glass” replicates the Pokémon Go feel of 2016-2017, the search will be as exciting as the discovery. While the title of the London iteration alluded to TS Eliot’s poem “The Lost Land” in New York City, the series took its name from Lewis Carroll. “In ‘Alice in Wonderland’ today, the phone is the new rabbit hole,” Enderby said.

Birnbaum, esteemed curator who was director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm for eight years before leaving to direct Acute Art, involved 11 artists, including well-known names – Olafur Eliasson And the KAWS – A favorite from the art world like Okoyomon precieux, winner of the 2021 Frieze Artist Award, Cao FeiAnd the Nina Chanel AbneyAnd the ko jeong a And the Julie Curtis. Some of their work unfolds over time and includes sound, while others are static like traditional sculptures.

Freed from the rules, they can gain new meaning from their unconventional contexts. My son’s play, “The Imaginary Friend,” is a black bearded man in the air, in high-top sneakers and striped socks, reading a book, with a halo around his head. “It’s a black Jesus, I think,” Birnbaum said. He noted that he would have a different effect if he appeared at a political protest in Washington rather than on the fine line.

Eliasson, no “Rainbow” in 2017 It was a ground-breaking VR artwork that he contributed to a five-piece collection, from a collective series titled “Wunderkammer”: a noisy beetle, a floating rock, a cloud, the sun and a bouquet of flowers growing across the pier.

“A lot of times these digital platforms are presented to us as if they were the opposite of reality, but I saw them as an extension of reality,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m a very representational artist, interested in blending mind and body, and my first thought is, ‘This takes your body away from you. Seems like a haven and an openness to hedonism. On second thought, he concluded that since people are tied to their phones, it would aim to reach them via the device in an “awareness” rather than a “narcotic” manner.