Parallel Studio is an experiential design studio led by Jesse Mejía and Ethan Rose, and their specialty is making a space feel alive. They pair sound with light, space, and whatever else a place calls for (fog, scent, touch, robotics) to get at bodily experience rather than visual spectacle alone. Their approach has three parts: content, meaning original compositions and sound design; hardware, meaning custom speaker systems, sensors, and large-scale sculpture; and software, meaning their own spatialization tools that keep all of it in sync.
Whether what we see is perception or reality.
Their portfolio reads like a who's who of companies with big lobbies. For Nike's House of Innovation in New York they built The Beacon, a three-story, 10,000-pound multimedia sculpture with 40 speakers, 29 screens, and 70 programmable lights, using directional sound that beams soundscapes to you invisibly. They have designed retail soundscapes for Google's Chelsea store, a surround-sound pop-up for Dolby in New York, "Weather Becomes Music" for Microsoft, and work for Under Armour, Adidas, and The North Face. Despite all that, the studio keeps an unusually low public profile and lets the exhibits do the talking.
Their Hopscotch exhibit is Unknown Atmospheres, made with the composer Seth Nehil; the sound is his, the light programming is Parallel's. It is a cube with fully mirrored walls and a grid of individually addressable LED bulbs, 11,000 in San Antonio and 7,000 in Portland, running a five-minute loop of six cinematic scenes synchronized to a surround score. The mirrors turn the grid into something that appears to go on forever. The low frequencies go through you rather than past you, which is why so many guests end up sitting on the floor. The loop leaves you asking whether there is really a difference.
Most people expect to watch this exhibit. The surprise is that they feel it. PBS News Hour featured it in a 2023 segment on how exhibitions like this are changing the way people take in art.
