Hyperreal Labs
Inventing new formats for experience at the intersection of art, emerging tech, and brand storytelling
Overview / The Opportunity
I co-founded Hyperreal Labs with creative partner Katherine Helen Fisher to meet a growing need in the brand and cultural landscape: how to create never-before-attempted interactive experiences using emerging technologies.
Whereas our prior studio Safety Third focused on high-caliber content creation, Hyperreal Labs was born out of a shift in the creative landscape—one driven by multimodal AI, custom interfaces, real-time rendering, and audience interaction.
At Hyperreal, we operate as a creative technology lab offering interactive media design and implementation services for brands and artists. With a dual focus on R&D and experiential execution, we partner with institutions, arts organizations, and commercial clients to prototype, develop, and launch bespoke, large-scale media experiences that can’t be achieved through traditional workflows.
Our work has been presented or featured by:
Harvard metaLAB, MIT Media Lab, Brown IGNITE Series, Georgia Tech’s Institute for People & Technology, Emerson College, The Walt Disney Concert Hall, and The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and UbiComp/International Symposium on Wearable Computers 2025: The State of Performance Art and Interactive Technology
What I Built
As Creative Director, I lead strategy, technical vision, and creative execution—bringing a background in branding and in-house systems-building, as well as domain expertise in emerging technologies. My graduate training in creative technology at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (ITP/IMA) informs the way I approach creative systems design, audience engagement, and storytelling through interactivity.
Core principles behind Hyperreal Labs include:
Custom pipelines for frontier experiences – When the tech doesn’t exist, we build it—from LiDAR-enabled interactions to multimodal AI tools and real-time LED workflows.
Client-centered experiential design – We work B2B, bringing new UX and interaction strategies to brands and cultural orgs looking to push boundaries in experiential marketing.
Academic and cultural collaboration – We regularly partner with universities and institutions at the leading edge of arts and technology to prototype what’s next.
Creative Work Highlights
Selected projects that showcase our creative and technical range include:
Dancing the Algorithm @ Jacob’s Pillow
An interactive exhibition exploring how technology shapes embodiment in the algorithmic age. Through immersive installations, visitors could move, play, and “dance” with responsive systems—blurring the boundaries between human and machine, performer and spectator. The work invites audiences to see technology not just as a tool, but as an intimate collaborator and a site for resistance, play, and reimagining what it means to be human.
Press:
Future Stages
An annual showcase of immersive performance, interactive media, and digital art, presented in partnership with NYU and StandardVision Studios. Each edition brings together artists working with sensor-based motion capture, real-time generative visuals, and other emergent technologies to explore the shifting relationship between the body and the digital world. By transforming virtual production environments into participatory stages, Future Stages invites audiences to step inside vivid, responsive interfaces—expanding the possibilities of live performance in the age of interactivity.
Truly LA
For Truly Hard Seltzer’s flagship branded space, Truly LA, we proposed expanding its role as an “immersive” venue by making it interactive. We designed and installed a series of sensor-driven interfaces across the venue’s large-scale TV wall, transforming it from passive display into a responsive, brand-centric experience. The installation demonstrated how interactive media can deepen audience connection, turning brand space into an active, participatory environment.
Harvard metaLAB
At Harvard metaLAB’s Data Kinesthetics Symposium, we presented our research and real-time interactive design work exploring how data can be mapped to and through the body in dance and performance contexts.
Lamentation: Dancing the Archive
An interactive media installation created in partnership with the Martha Graham Dance Company, merging Martha Graham’s iconic Lamentation with cutting-edge technology. Audiences engage with archival 3D film by dancing alongside the historic footage and using their own gestures to manipulate it in real time—bridging past and present through movement. The work was supported by a Google Artists + Machine Intelligence Research Award and premiered at Jacob’s Pillow’s Dancing the Algorithm exhibition in 2025.
Breaking Counterpoint
A work-in-progress performance at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute reimagining Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint through live dance, generative media, and real-time systems: a Hyperreal Labs project exploring how music, movement, and technology can merge into an embodied, participatory performance.
Closing Thought
Hyperreal Labs is more than a creative technology studio—it’s a speculative engine for what interactive media can become. By fusing technical R&D with brand storytelling, we help clients imagine and actualize the impossible.