This museum becomes meta.
The city’s first hip-hop museum in the Bronx will have a new online perk, with both live and online exhibits, The Post learned last week during an exclusive tour of the space under construction.
The $80 million Universal Hip Hop Museum will feature items such as a giant Kanye West oil painting and Snoop Dogg’s bike from the short-lived MTV sketch show “Doggy. Fizzle Televizzle”.
It will also broadcast live musical performances, break dance sessions and fashion shows that can be viewed online.
“When people come here, they have a physical experience looking at the historical artifacts,” said museum founder Rocky Bucano. “But when they leave here, this experience should continue even when they are at home.”
The two-story, 53,000-square-foot museum at 65 E. 149th Street in Melrose will be attached to Bronx Point, a mixed-use complex under development that overlooks Mill Pond Park and the Harlem River.
The museum — currently just an open concrete shell — will eventually house a 250-seat theater and showcase the five elements of hip hop — DJing, hosting, break dancing, graffiti and knowledge, Bucano said.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done before the museum, which began construction last year, opens in 2024 to go on display, archivist Adam Silverstein said.
And Bucano is currently working on securing a 1970s MTA subway car that will function as a bridge over the grand staircase near the entrance.
Its metaverse — an immersive digital world accessible via virtual reality headsets and a smartphone — is also a work in progress.
“In addition to showing the flyers, graffiti, video footage and archival footage, we’re excited to bring out b-boys, breakdancing in a physical space,” said Mike Carnevale, whose company Carnevale Interactive oversees the design of the online space. in cooperation with Microsoft and MIT. “You’re not in the audience watching this on screen, your brain believes you’re really there.”
The technology is called “holoportation” – projecting 3D people and objects from the real world into the digital world, according to Microsoft.
“You can have Naughty by Nature live in the metaverse,” Bucano said, “and it won’t be the traditional avatars, it would be the actual band.”
Carnevale said other metaverse experiences the museum hopes to include are Grandmaster Flash breaking records at block parties in the 1970s and Notorious BIG rapping on a street corner in Bed-Stuy in 1989.
“We see a metaverse where you can transport people to different times and places, so not only are they witnessing history, but they’re being immersed in hip hop culture,” he said.
For now, the museum is holding temporary exhibits at the nearby Bronx Terminal Market, where they just completed an exhibit that cataloged the hip from 1980 to 1985. It had sections dedicated to hip hop pioneers Kurits Blow and DJ Great Wizard Theodore. Guests were able to pose for photos in a fake subway car covered in graffiti. Next month they will move on to an exhibition that covers the genre from 1986 to 1990.
The museum was funded by government grants, charities, a $5 million donation from Microsoft, and donations from music producers Lyor Cohen, who previously ran Def Jam Recordings, and Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records. So far, the museum has acquired $35 million.
–
