SUMMIT ONE VANDERBILT ART AND DESIGN

Air by Kenzo Digital

Kenzo Digital is an artist who specializes in creating mind-bending, resonant, and emotionally powerful stories in physical space.

 

Kenzo has taken the 1000 foot high canvas of SUMMIT and created one of the largest, most mind-bending art experiences in the world—called Air.

A man lounging on a transparent glass floor with the New York skyline reflecting in mirrored panels around him.

From Grand Central, the SUMMIT NYC Air exhibit begins with a resetting of your senses. You ascend, breaking through into another realm.

Visitors inside a multi-level mirroed structure with transparent floors, showcasing panoramic city views.

Transcendence 1

You emerge into a boundless, structureless world, one with its own relationship to physics and time.
Two individuals floating in a reflective, transformative space illuminated by blue lights, showcasing art and architecture.

Transcendence 2

From a new perspective, you revel in the breadth of the spectacle and witness the ecstatic first moments of new visitors entering this NYC interactive art exhibit.

Visitors in the mirror room with silver balloons, reflecting themselves against the New York City skyline backdrop.
Visitors in the mirror room with silver balloons, reflecting themselves against the New York City skyline backdrop.

Affinity

The NYC digital art experience evolves, becomes interactive, playful, as you connect physically to the space.

Unity

Finally, you become part of the space itself—your cloud portrait part of a mesmerizing, infinitely evolving sky.

Air at night

As the sun sets, the magic of Air takes new form as dramatic waves of color electrify Transcendence and Affinity, turning SUMMIT One Vanderbilt into a beacon of light and energy, visible to all of New York City and beyond.

Kenzo digital

Air by Kenzo Digital

I love New York City. It’s the home of my family in this country, and to this day it’s one of my biggest influences as an artist and a human being. It has molded me, and given me opportunities I wouldn’t have had anywhere else.

With Air, I want to create a space where the intoxicating sense of aspiration and inspiration that New York gives me is shared with you, the visitor; a place that pays tribute to all that New York is, can be, will be. I want to create an experience that is personal to you, unique in every moment of every day: challenging, eye-opening, euphoric.

On the surface, Air is a simple idea, carried out in maximalist form; and you soon realize that its effect is deep and wide, upending sensorial norms and reconnecting you to your primal mind. Air defamiliarizes the world around you such that your relationship to it is undone. The process of finding a new equilibrium opens up a sense of elemental curiosity, and you are rewarded for your exploration.

Air is a space that is physiologically singular: your senses come alive. You look around, and what you see is ecstatic—a multiplicity of sky, city, and people. You take a step, and everything rearranges, at incredible scale, as if in defiance of physics. The countless planes of reflection make it feel like you’re suspended in air, with no single ‘you’ but hundreds, seen from every angle—inviting existential questions of identity.

Air is an immersion in nature in the heart of Manhattan, a Central Park in the sky—bringing the environment to New Yorkers and tourists alike in a whole new way. Whether sunrise or sunset, blue sky or clouds, rain or snow, weather patterns are magnified. On bright days, you feel warmth on your skin from every angle, as if you’re floating amidst the orbit of multiple suns. On rainy days, you feel as if you’re inside the storm, the vitality of the cloudscape enveloping everything around you. Whatever form the sky takes, Air changes your relationship to it, delivering a wondrous range of perspectives and promise.

Air is another dimension, where you discover that time rearranges itself as fluidly as the view. When the world around you is as beautiful in minute detail as in grand gesture, every moment has something glorious to offer, and the automaticity of your movements and thoughts recedes. Through its boundless juxtapositions of form, Air compels you to live in the present moment—calm, aware, free.

Air connects you to everything: weather, light, people. Air reveals shared consciousness, invites you to revel in collective wonder. Air serves as a monument for the unification of man and nature – a beacon of possibility, for New York City and everywhere beyond.