Brooklyn Navy Yard Spotlights New York’s Growing Immersive Media Industry and Creative Tech Talent Pipeline at XR Brooklyn Event

Event convened artists, technologists, industry leaders and emerging talent to explore the future of immersive experience and creative technology

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (October 6, 2026) - The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) hosted its first ever XR Brooklyn event on October 1, bringing together artists, designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders to highlight New York City's leadership in the immersive media and cultural production sectors. Through interactive installations, panel discussions, demonstrations, and career development programming, the event showcased New York City's growing creative technology sector and the Brooklyn Navy Yard's role in cultivating the talent and infrastructure to support its growth.

As experiential technologies reshape entertainment, art, and design, New York City is well positioned to leverage its longstanding creative economy. XR Brooklyn explored how cultural institutions, startups, businesses, nonprofits, and public-sector partners are driving innovation and creating opportunities for growth across the industry.

"At the Navy Yard, we have always been focused on building an ecosystem where creative businesses can thrive," said Lindsay Greene, President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. "Immersive art and technology represent an exciting opportunity for New York's creative economy, fusing the amazing raw creative talents of New Yorkers with new tech-enabled fabrication and manufacturing methods and other advanced technologies that allow creators to bring their work to life. The XR Brooklyn event highlights this sector and the Navy Yard's role as a hub for companies and emerging talent. We have a unique role in providing students and career builders with the skills, resources, and career pathways that will define the future of these creative industries, and build pathways to the economic opportunity they bring."

The event program began with At the Center: XR in NYC+, an interactive digital mapping and conversation piece that will help inform the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) creative resources map. The creative economy network was further highlighted in Creative Tech in the City Cultural Stack, a panel on the funding, investment, and cross-sector partnerships fueling creative technology. Continuing investment into the creative economy in partnership with NYCEDC, Plug and Play also announced its next AI Nexus program cohort in March 2027, which will be focused on Media & Entertainment startups, and a call for applications.

"XR Brooklyn was a great convening of this innovative community, from policymakers to practitioners and everyone in between. The talks, installations and 1-on-1 sessions gave a lot of shared context for meeting new folks, making connections, and helping established professionals and up-and-comers to locate themselves this ecosystem, feel a sense of belonging, and find opportunities to contribute," said David Bianciardi, Founder and Principal of AV&C.

As a concluding panel centering artistic production in the creative economy, Between Tool and Agent: Artists, AI, & the Production Process explored how artistic research, fabrication, engineering, and emerging technologies are transforming the production and presentation of creative work. Panelist Jason Isolini, a New York-based artist and media theorist, spoke to how a deep understanding of a platform can open entirely new forms of storytelling. His featured installation, The Ballad of a Laborer, builds a stop-motion narrative within Google Street View, using the platform's navigable, open-ended nature to let viewers choose their own path through the story.

"I've always been drawn to industrial spaces for their character and the sense of opportunity. Jennifer Egan once described the rail lines wrapping the Navy Yard as a kind of circuitry, connecting one producer to the next," said Jason Isolini, Artist and Creator of The Ballad of a Laborer. "Spending three years mapping the Yard, I came to see it less as a backdrop and more as a collaborator. Ballad of a Laborer exists because this place and the people who steward it leave room for invention."

Shown at XR Brooklyn in physical form for the first time, the installation was made possible through Planar and Pufferfish Displays, who partnered with BNYDC and the artist to create a 15' x 15' panoramic display allowing users to engage with the original artwork. Planar, a global leader in visual technology, provided Fifteen Planar® Simplicity™ M Series 4K LCDs for the backdrop, while Pufferfish Displays contributed its signature 360-degree interactive spherical display.

"XR Brooklyn showcases the extraordinary creativity emerging at the intersection of technology, culture and design," said Stephen Patterson, CEO at Pufferfish Displays. "We're proud to help bring immersive work to life in ways that captivate audiences and inspire new possibilities for visual communication."

As an additional partner and leader in research, practice, and teaching in the emerging media and immersive fields, NYU Tandon School of Engineering showcased seven interactive works for XR Brooklyn, with faculty participation throughout the event's programming and talent development features.

"XR Brooklyn is a perfect canvas for our students, faculty, and the start-ups we incubate to showcase their cutting-edge design and immersive media talents," said Sayar Lonial, Vice Dean, External Affairs & Public Relations at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. "We are proud of our Brooklyn roots and excited that NYU Tandon @ the Yard is an active member of the Brooklyn Navy Yard technology ecosystem."

Alongside NYU work and the featured installation, XR Brooklyn showcased Navy Yard tenants and other Brooklyn makers whose practices span light, data, sculpture, and 3D Capture.

Additionally, XR Brooklyn attendees experienced:

• AV&C and 5TEN Visuals partnered to create a large-scale LED media sculpture (titled: pile), featuring hanging volumetric light forms and a mass of seemingly discarded TV screens.
• BREAKFAST presented kinetic flip-disc artwork that records viewers in real-time; guests were also invited to tour the downstairs studio featuring, among other works, Antarctic Ice (a kinetic piece driven by live NASA data on global ice melt levels).
• Artist Frank Benson joined to present his sculptural practice, showing how 3D capture, printing, and human technique translate into finished work. Benson has had work shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum, and the New Museum, and Jeffrey Deitch.
• Jason Krugman, who has had a Brooklyn Navy Yard studio for 14 years and made and shown large-scale sculptural lighting work for Yard tenants, public art partnerships, and Yard exhibitions, exhibited Prism, a six-food icosahedra light sculpture inspired by the way plants distribute nutrients, and Firefly, a wind-sensitive kinetic artwork that invites participation.
• Eric Forman Studio's Substratus/Signal laid a 20-foot light sculpture across the floor, built entirely from storm-felled trees gathered in New York City parks, to continue his work exploring the human-nature-technology interface.
• Sea of Probabilities, an LED wall created by WLAB, allowed guests to open the piece in browser via their phones and interact with waves of rippling six-sided die.
• New York Capture showcased their Big Rig (a ring of camera towers that captures a subject in 360 degrees) allowed attendees to scan themselves into 3D models. The studio also displayed its cultural heritage work documenting the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center through LiDAR, Gaussian splatting and photogrammetry.

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About the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation

Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) is a not-for-profit corporation that serves as the real estate developer and property manager of the Yard on behalf of its owner, the City of New York. BNYDC's mission is to fuel New York City's economic vitality by creating and preserving quality jobs, growing the City's modern industrial sector and its businesses, and connecting the local community with the economic opportunity and resources of the Yard. BNYDC helps connect local talent to quality jobs via the Albert C. Wiltshire Employment Center and the Brooklyn STEAM Center high school located on the campus. BNYDC's vision is a vibrant and dense, modern manufacturing community where businesses are provided the stability they need to invest, grow, and thrive and where diverse candidates can attain quality jobs. Brooklynnavyyard.org