Family Open Studio: Nancy Baker Cahill Sat, Feb 3, 2024, 11 am–3 pm

Family Open Studio: Nancy Baker Cahill

Sat, Feb 3, 2024
11 am–3 pm

A 3D rendered creature with trailing tentacles, wings, and feathers, floats in the sky over the city view from the Whitney's 8th floor terrace.
A 3D rendered creature with trailing tentacles, wings, and feathers, floats in the sky over the city view from the Whitney's 8th floor terrace.

Nancy Baker Cahill, process sketch for CENTO, 2023. Participatory augmented reality software

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The Susan and John Hess Family Theater is equipped with an induction loop and infrared assistive listening system. Accessible seating is available.

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Floor 3, Theater

For families with kids of all ages

Families with kids of all ages are invited to get creative with artist Nancy Baker Cahill in the Hess Family Theater.

Come meet CENTO, a monumental augmented reality (AR) creature that gracefully hovers over the Whitney’s eighth-floor terrace, suspended in an intricate virtual habitat. 

CENTO is a fictional, futuristic creature that combines different species through interactive augmented reality. It has a snake-like body with scales and fungus filaments, tentacled limbs similar to a cephalopod (the marine animals whose heads directly connect to arms), a wing like a manta ray, and colorful feathers. Visitors are invited to view CENTO through an app where you can pick and attach one of twelve feathers to CENTO, each representing a different function like communication, navigation, energy conversion, or memory storage crucial for its survival and evolution.

Join us to contribute a feather to CENTO through AR and then use your imagination to create your own creature for the future. Combine qualities from different species to invent a never-before-seen life-form and their habitat.