If you told your kids on a Saturday morning you were taking them for an outing to Mercer Labs, you would probably get a few sideways looks. Science is great, sure - but do we really have to do it on the weekend, too?

But "The Museum of Art & Technology" sounds considerably more intriguing, right? And debuting in February 2024 after much anticipation, this truly breathtaking new cultural destination, located in the heart of Manhattan's historic Financial District (FiDi), has been a sensation ever since.

Admittedly, a bit of "immersive fatigue" has set in within the NYC cultural scene, with each new Van Gogh / NASA / nature inspired exhibit trying to out-dazzle the other. The difference here is, first of all, the sheer scale of the exhibition space, at 15 rooms and with 35,000 total square feet. But just as important is the fact that it is essentially the brainchild of Roy Nachum, the venerable New York based Israeli artist hailed for his viscerally tactile creations. (For a further note of cred, he also designed the cover artwork for Rihanna's 2015 album 'Anti'.)

Spring of 2025 saw the introduction of the thought-provoking 'Maestros and the Machines', which imagined what the great geniuses of the past - Mozart, da Vinci, even legendary Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai - would have created with the technology of today. How accurate it might be is honestly beside the point - it's more a matter of stimulating the imagination to reach across the centuries, and consider how culture has evolved, which it does quite successfully.

'Maestros and the Machines' is still currently on view; but now the museum has added the spectacularly ambitious 'Engine: Field of Light' to the overall experience. Also designed by Nachum, it notably invites another sense into the occasion, via a new collaboration with Venice-Beach-by-way-of-Switzerland fragrance purveyor Aeir - whose scents are actually created using NASA technology.

So imagine an immersive exhibition that first promises to surround you with a scent so romantically monikered as 'Grand Rose', as you prepare to enter a space which does a strikingly effective job of transporting you into an alternate vision of, well...space. Considering "space tourism", for all its hype, is still a long, long way off for pretty much everyone, a $50 trip (discounted for children) to the constellations sounds like a pretty attractive proposition, does it not?

And to ensure no two visits to 'Field of Light' will be the same, the environment actually reacts to the participant, in ways that really have to be experienced to be fully appreciated. In other words...the written word simply cannot truly do it justice.

“'The Engine' is a space where light, sound, and presence become instruments of imagination,” Nachum ethereally explains. "'With 'Field of Light', I wanted to create a world that responds to the visitor - a living environment where each moment is unique, and perception itself becomes part of the experience.”

Ultimately what the exhibit seeks to do - and accomplishes quite handily - is remove us from the grounding of our everyday existences, and reconfigure our relationships with such boring old concepts as gravity, light perception, physicality and movement, if only for a short period of time. Expect to emerge at least a little bit changed in how you process the world around you afterwards.