The “m-mom, can you come pick me up?” of interactive art; the (belated) review.

If I had synesthesia, the involuntary phenomenon where two or more senses overlap at one time, I’d imagine Meow Wolf Denver‘s Convergence Station smells like a spearmint candle next to an incense stick. Confusing, overpowering, visually inconsistent– yet still bizarre and cohesive as a whole.

Is it performative art? Is it a children’s museum targeted at millennials longing for their childhood again? Is it in the Mile High City so you can experience it while a mile high? All these questions, and I’m afraid there’s not yet an answer I can give, despite visiting this November. I understand it’s late January now, but it’s just Convergence Station, in its entirety– a whimsical-yet-malignant art experience like none other.

Confused is an understatement when it comes to the experience. Not one moment hits impressively hard in terms of thinking, but all together, it blends into a larger experience and three floors of chaos that you don’t exactly notice until you’re standing in a brightly lit, average white-walled stairwell, the absence of sound and visuals suddenly fuzzing out like an unplugged monitor without power.

In that stairwell was like a sudden snapping back to reality, leaving you both disorientated and silent. Wondering now, what just happened to me?

One moment you’re being squeezed down a tunnel that slowly spirals the wall and floor, taking you stumbling with it… the next walking into a room that’s been turned into a multi-floor AI imagination of what a jungle should look like– but make it pink and alien.

Then, a dark room with a vast ceiling spinning with stars and orbiting planets that briefly takes you on a laser lightshow because of the two people who were standing in a corner fiddling around a throne that wouldn’t look out of place in an Amazon Original. Two steps further, and you’re facing a brightly lit laundromat with some unsettling lore and slowly creeping dread that comes from the dingy little corners and uncanny valley effect creeping inward.

Is it a video game, demanding all of your attention all at once? Certainly not, because while there’s an interactive touchpoint experience, it’s entirely optional and not needed to explore the entire experience in full.

Spend enough time talking to someone about Meow Wolf Denver, and you’ll quickly discover despite the endless rooms, you’ve certainly still missed something dramatic and unique, hidden in a nook behind that one thing– two rooms over from the shifting, multicolored mural where each trick of the light reveals a new image.

Meow Wolf is intentionally a singular experience, your brain, ears, eyes versus the artist’s design– yet you are also surrounded by others just as interchangeably dazed.

Hours melt by intentionally, and I still believe there’s more to see, experience, and record. The living actors and art bring the world to life, even if they were still slightly distanced away from the rest of us. A breathing, dilapidated cassette futurism reimagining of Denver– but instead of being reconstructed, it was left to decay as the world moved on.

Yet the people who inhabited and live inside of Convergence Station refuse (or perhaps, sinisterly enough, can’t) give up their home quite yet.

All images taken on an iPhone 13, in November 2022, as part of the
Automattic Division Meetup in Denver, Colorado.