Projected onto the façade of the New Museum during the Festival of Ideas for the New City, Mixed Tape transforms a familiar institutional surface into a field of color, gesture, and visible construction. Rather than appearing as a seamless digital image, the projection foregrounds its own making, allowing process and imperfection to become part of the experience.

The work reimagines the museum as an illuminated object rather than a neutral backdrop. Brightly colored strips of tape activate the façade, tracing its geometry with bands of color that feel both playful and deliberate. Light clings to edges and surfaces, making the architecture appear handled, altered, and temporarily reauthored.

This effect is achieved through an intentionally analog process. A physical scale model of the museum—painted entirely black—is filmed from a pedestrian viewpoint as tape is applied by hand. Those hands remain visible, introducing a human scale that disrupts the authority of the institutional façade and suggests unseen systems shaping its appearance.

As the projection unfolds, the visible labor alludes to the bureaucratic and protocol-driven mechanisms behind cultural institutions. Rather than rejecting these systems, Mixed Tape exposes and inverts them, using humor and artifice to make the museum feel more transparent and vibrant. The result is a projection that is both celebratory and critical, transforming the façade into a living surface shaped by light, labor, and intention.

Photos of the process