The email was masterfully vague. Early last month, when an invitation to something called INTER_ that was billed as New York’s “newest interactive and avant-garde art journey” landed in my inbox, I kept rereading the pitch in hopes of extracting actual specifics. The description resembled a marketer’s dream word cloud, promising an interactive projection show, a “hypnotizing activated digital floor,” an “AI-powered photo station,” and “a mirrored digital infinity experience.” But what was it all for? I wondered. What am I actually going to be looking at here?

In a way, this unabashedly vacant appeal from INTER_ struck me as a logical end result to the past decade spent in witness of the creep of social media upon our geographic space. The regular eventization of “places” to visit and document is now as familiar to us as the actual landmarks dotting our built landscapes. By now, you have either personally seen or at least been made aware of the gamut ranging from the accursed Museum of Ice Cream to the once mania-inspiring 29Rooms, the hated immersive Van Gogh experience to the slightly less hated David Hockney one, and of course, Yayoi Kusama’s commanding and inescapable Infinity Mirror Rooms, which have turned the 94-year-old artist’s statements of transcendence into some of the most ’grammable spots on the planet.  

The obvious culprit for all this commodified immersion, of course, is our subservience to platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where standing out on the feed necessitates scouting newer and prettier locations for what feels like life’s never-ending photo shoot. Personally, I’m also partial to the theory that we’re also just seeking continuously higher grades of eyeball-feel that will register above the operant threshold of our overly-connected reality: when life already feels like a thousand screens blaring in your face, Times Square doesn’t exactly hit anymore. We crave the kind of sublime awe that the Romantics found on the edge of a seaside precipice; but where else can we turn but these retina-flooding boxes of “activation” that so convincingly intimate, if just for a second, the existence of a better, more beautiful world?

To be fair, I say this as someone who can’t remember ever actually visiting one of these things. This has to do with my nuclear-level impatience for lines, sure, but also, let’s be honest, I’ve still actively bought into the delusion that I can win whatever game of 5D chess that is cultivating a plausibly casual social media presence—of which visiting Instagram traps would be the antithesis. But the mind can open. And so the coinciding launch of INTER_ and the opening of the new Infinity Mirror Room at David Zwirner offered an efficient opportunity to, well, immerse myself at the high-low bounds of the genre. What I hoped to answer was what the INTER_ invitation made me question: Did any of it need a point? 

The INTER_ exhibit, located on Canal Street, offers timed visiting slots. I paid $41.36 and showed up early on a Monday afternoon to join two sets of couples, roughly my age, for a 45-minute excursion within about a half dozen various rooms. In the “Induction” room, we wore 3D glasses and sat on bean bags to watch a 12-minute video that blasted quotes from Rumi, Oprah, and Anaïs Nin (along with a repeated exhortation to “Move around!”) with swirling, bright screensaver enthusiasm. The disembodied voice of a British woman introduced herself as our guide to the “Interverse” and encouraged us to “enjoy the journey without worrying about the destination.” Afterward, an employee (an “Inter-guardian”) ushered us to a room with a bigger wraparound screen that we could wave or dance at in order to create flubber-like outlines of ourselves amidst the graphics while a foggy electronic beat pulsed. At one point, a shower of bubbles descended upon us; my journeymen and I got our phones out immediately. 

We moved through a hallway lush with Rainforest Café–esque arrangements of artificial plants and flowers; a spaceshippy corridor gave way to a “cave” where stalactites and rock fissures “glowed” with magma. My favorite part was standing underneath an installation where hundreds of strips of sheer fabric dangled illuminated from the ceiling, like a waterfall or jellyfish tentacles. But the elemental theme felt at odds with the omnipresent screens, which my “reality bending” glasses wrapped into splinters of rainbow everywhere I looked (A headache felt imminent). There was no further instruction given for our journey, except for a few mirrors you could use markers to write on in response to prompts like “What do you want to hold in your heart?” (“Peace,” “N+J,” “calcium buildup” being amongst previous responses) and “What are you grateful for?” (“God,” “Netflix,” “Nancy was here.”) In the final station, we watched recent footage of ourselves walking around the exhibit, which felt both meta and also kind of like a rip-off. I left the Interverse feeling exhausted and flat, opting to skip the gift shop offering $4 selenite crystal sticks in favor of finding the nearest mechanical underground box that would take me back to Brooklyn and my home box.  

The next morning, on my way to Chelsea, I made two crucial mistakes. The first was forgoing the customary Aux Merveilleux de Fred bakery stop I make whenever I’m in the West Side; the second was discounting the ramrod determination of New York’s weekday tourists. By the time I rolled up to David Zwirner at 10:30 a.m.—just half an hour after the gallery opened—the line already stretched down the block to 11th Avenue, wrapping generously around the corner. (Let this be a lesson: always brake for croissants!)

So I waited, both annoyed with myself for not thinking to call in a press appointment but also heartened that I was participating in a fully populist version of the Infinity Mirror Room viewing experience. For a beautiful, 70-degree Tuesday, there were much worse places to be than standing on the sidewalk, watching boats gliding down the Hudson and also a group of international vloggers rating the bottled water that Zwirner staff passed out from a little wagon (“Poland Spring!” They marveled at the camera, hopefully ironically). A stand offered a QR code you could scan to listen to Kusama’s poetry; no one touched it. I tried to pass the time reading emails until my phone started overheating from being held in direct sunlight. At the thought of ending up at the front with a dead phone—horror!—I put it away. 

Every half hour or so, a staff member moved up and down the line to make sure everyone knew the wait was strictly for the room itself (officially titled “Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love”)—the rest of the show, expanding on the artist’s trademark concern for organic shapes and repetition via paintings and playgroundy sculpture, remaining extremely open for walk-ins. I asked him for tips on avoiding the line “next time,” and he recommended visiting weekdays around noon, after the morning rush. Saturdays, he confirmed, were “insane.” The longest wait so far, apparently, was only 2.5 hours—which bummed me out a bit, only because I was hoping for a good Kusama diehard story that involved overnight camping. (A friend who’s visited previous Infinity Mirror Rooms at Zwirner had warned me of four-hour-long waits and lines that closed after certain cutoffs). 

Finally, 90 minutes later, it was time. They ushered us in batches of six; I was the last in my group to duck into the corner opening of the 13-foot room. By the time I straightened up, everyone else was swiveling their phones in every possible angle. I tried to stay planted and quickly wipe my mind to take in the view: inside the mirrored interior, all the round, rainbow-colored windows made it look like we were standing amidst an explosion of birthday balloons, or like we were inside of a shower of ice cream sprinkles. It was beautiful. Was there anything else? I strained for any additional overwhelming feelings to arrive as I stood with these other blinking strangers in our chosen box of the moment. 

And then it was over. After our single allotted minute, a staffer opened the door and announced the end of our immersion. In a panic, I realized I hadn’t taken a single picture. The real point of all this! There was no time to pose, so I fired one off blindly, with a random man in the focal point. A total feeling of gloom overcame me as I filed out. Only later, when I examined the photograph more closely, did I notice the rear view of myself visible between one of the glassy seams: rumpled sweatshirt, arms outstretched, sweaty head cocked in desperation. Instagram trap or not, Kusama and her all-seeing reflectors apparently had my back. Now there was proof of life or, at least, presence. Nancy was here!