Mapper's Delight is a cultural tale representing worlds, experiences and gameplay told through the most-listened-to musical genre on the planet. Part explorer, part cultural critic, part archaeologist, part DJ, the Datanauts of Mapper's Delight use sight, sound and touch to investigate the global distances traveled by the lyrics contained in each rap artist's career while exploring the secret flows of hip-hop's spacetime through a panoptic interface. This exhibit immerses the viewer in an alternate experience of reality by creating a viewpoint that is above this world; by combining two different configurations of space and time: a) that of the geographic reference in the lyric, with b) the viewer's experience of assessing the visualization of this travel – something that is typically reserved for rappers or for those who perform close, academic readings of rap lyrics.

The Team

Tahir Hemphill is a designer, creative technologist and educator based in New York City. Hemphill's practice investigates the role systems play in the generation of form and the role that collaborative knowledge production plays in the resilience of communities. Hemphill is influenced by scientific work that pushes investigation to artistic limits and artistic work that pushes repetition toward scientific method. Over the past 20 years, this productive tension between art and technology has been fueled by his reverence for scientific methodologies as well as his irreverent tinkering with them. Since 2010, Hemphill has been operating the Rap Research Lab, a creative technology studio that explores rap as a cultural indicator through educational, editorial and creative interrogations.

David A.M. Goldberg is an accomplished Hawaii-based writer, teacher, programmer and media developer who has used a lifelong interest in art, culture and technology to transform the means by which people access, assess and organize knowledge. Goldberg's cultural lens was cut from a matrix of liberal arts and hard science. Early on, he spotted profound reiterations of America's best and worst cultural and social practices in the digital context of video games, chat rooms, mailing lists and the early World Wide Web. That lens was polished by a commitment to writing about these changes, teaching others to recognize them, and lecturing at universities such as UC Santa Cruz, USC, CCA, Otis and Columbia.

Nick Fox-Gieg is an animator and creative technologist based in Toronto. His film The Orange won the jury prize for Best Animated Short at SXSW 2010. His films have also screened at the Ottawa, Rotterdam and TIFF film festivals, at the Centre Pompidou and on CBC TV. Fox-Gieg was awarded an Eyebeam Fellowship in 2012, a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006, and has received media-arts grants from Bravo!Fact, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the arts councils of Ontario, Pennsylvania, Toronto and West Virginia. He holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Most recently, he's been working on virtual-reality projects at Framestore and Google Creative Lab.

Untrained Eyes

Untrained Eyes is a conceptual technology project that takes its inspiration from observing the explicit bias that can be found during everyday image searches within Google and other public-image archives. This interactive installation will expose the problems of our current machine-learning trajectories by revealing the hidden challenges of creating artificial-intelligence algorithms. When viewers enter the installation, they will encounter a salon-style hanging arrangement of dozens of framed images. After a few seconds, the images will all change in synchronicity, as if a new image-search batch was loaded. Each one will display a physically similar face to one "lucky" audience member standing in the center of the room. This sets off an unsettling chain reaction, as everyone in the space tries to find the target person and then focuses in on him or her. It is an exaggeration of our selfie-obsessed culture, which raises a question for all to consider when engaging in a dialog about inclusion: Are you really ready for it?

The Team

Glenn Kaino is an artist with a career that spans a wide range of media and creative activity. In 2012, he was selected by the State Department to represent the United States in the 13th International Cairo Biennale in Cairo and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 12th Lyon Biennial in Lyon, France, and Prospect 3 in New Orleans. He has had exhibitions at The Modern Fort Worth, Texas, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and many others. He has upcoming solo exhibitions at the CAC Cincinnati, the High Museum of Atlanta and Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Jesse Williams is a native of Chicago and graduate of Temple University. He began his career teaching at low-income Philadelphia public charter schools. After moving to New York City, he later began his professional acting career. Williams stars in ABC's Grey's Anatomy and has served as senior producer and correspondent for Epix docuseries America Divided with Norman Lear. He also executive-produced the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement. Williams gained international attention while accepting the 2016 BET Humanitarian Award, where he spoke about police brutality and systemic inequities.

Your Hands Are Feet

Your Hands Are Feet is an interactive room-scale VR experience that places you in surreal realities made up of experiential metaphors. You start out in a kitchen with a carton of six eggs, which can be picked up and thrown or cracked on the countertop. Each egg acts as a portal to a new experience; the room is transformed into a surreal landscape, presenting a reality where your head can be in the clouds, the whole world can crumble around you, you can be all thumbs or have two left feet (but really, though). Your Hands Are Feet is being produced in connection with Egg, an independent feature film created by an entirely female and Sundance-alumni team.

The Team

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a 2017 Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, an artist at the 2017 Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab and a 2016 Oculus Launchpad fellow. She is the founder of the Stupid Hackathon and is the director of Idea New Rochelle, a nonprofit dedicated to creating an alliance of facilities for the immersive tech community in New York. Amelia began her career as an opera singer and became the writer, director and star of productions that were too weird for opera, theater and museums but are quite at home in the bonkers world of VR.

Sarah Rothberg is an artist who works with emerging technologies. In 2014, Sarah became fascinated with Facebook's new efforts to capitalize on nostalgia and its coinciding acquisition of virtual reality company Oculus VR. This launched her interest in virtual reality and its implications, leading her to create her first major VR experience, Memory/Place, which has been called by Artspace perhaps "the first true virtual-reality art masterpiece." Her VR artworks Touching A Cactus and Memory/Place were recently included in the Bunker pop-up show at Sotheby's S2 Gallery. She teaches VR at NYU and has been an artist-in-residence at NYU, Superbright, Mana Contemporary and Harvestworks.

*Recommendations for the Alternate Realities grants program were made by an independent selection committee, but the final selections were made by Engadget's editorial leadership. Committee members with financial or contractual ties to a project or artist being considered were asked to recuse themselves from recommending those projects to avoid any perceived or actual conflicts of interest.

**Note: The Engadget Experience was originally scheduled for November 16th. Ticket holders have been notified of the date change.