From there visitors either go up to the exhibition floors or turn into the cocoonlike main theater. The theater is Mr. Leeser’s single nod to the past, making references to the films of the old European avant-garde in witty contrast to the images of commercial Hollywood that dominate the museum’s collections. The theater’s faceted interior, composed of triangular felt panels colored a shocking Yves Klein blue, bring to mind early German Expressionism. The curtain, a violent explosion of color designed by Cindy Sirko, looks like a digital version of the paintings of early Soviet artists. (When I was last there a welder was working in a corner, and sparks flew across the blue surfaces, adding to the impression that I had stepped onto a set for “Metropolis.”)

But it is in the exhibition spaces that you are able to immerse yourself fully in Mr. Leeser’s architectural vision. Climbing the main staircase you slip past an informal video room with a system of shallow benches and ramps that are seamlessly integrated into the floor. Mr. Leeser wanted to avoid the boring box enclosed behind a black curtain that is used to display video art in most museums, and here he has created something both more casual and more intimate.

The projection wall extends directly over the staircase, so that visitors entering the space from below will sometimes seem to emerge directly out of the image. From there they follow the stairs up another flight to the main galleries, where videos will be projected onto temporary partitions, creating a maze of images that further erases the distinction between the architecture and the visual imagery it is meant to house.

The idea is to capture, in a building, the essence of a world in which images proliferate all around us — from our phones, in the back seats of taxis — and in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate physical reality from the sleekly manufactured realities of the digital age.