Asher Young, Experiential Artist

We’re back for another very fun interview on our podcast of Unlocking YOUR World of Creativity. We go around the world to talk to creative practitioners and leaders about how they get inspired, how they organize their ideas, and how they gain the confidence and connections to launch their work out into the world. 

Today, we explore the world of NYC-based artist and creative director Asher Young.  Asher He is the founder of Challenge Your Imagination, a creative direction, design, and producing studio developing projects internally and for others. 

Our main conversation will be around Asher’s most recent piece Pathways at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, going on Tour with DPR, and what the collaboration and logistical side of creating these immersive audience experiences are like.

Pathways at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden use lasers to draw lines of light between a series of trees, creating a visible network and illuminating a new path for Lightscape visitors to explore. 

Asher describes it as “a high-powered laser that bounces off trees through the botanic gardens that you can see at night. It’s a beam of life that sort of ricochets between the trees”

• The focus of the piece is on Mycorrhizal networks. Inspired through the works and science of Suzanne Simard, an ecologist discovered that trees communicate their needs and send each other nutrients via a network of latticed fungi buried in the soil — in other words, she found, they “talk” to each other  

Asher explains, “that her work discovered that it's not competition. Plants actually share resources”

Pathways utilize light, which is the source of nutrients for the plants at night, to show those connections when a lot of that work is being done.

DPR: Regime Tour is a world tour that immerses fans in the world of music collective DPR. Asher talks about the part of the creative process with this world tour is about rethinking what the concert experience could be from the perspective of an audience. 

• How do we merge theater, art, installation, and music? 
• How do we think about collectives and how do we demonstrate that to the audience?
• How do we use the pre-show to warm people up to other things that are gonna happen later?

The show opens in September 2022 

Mark asks: “What are the logistics of moving this experience from city to city?”

• when you're doing 55 cities worldwide and they're all different sizes
• it does have to fit in trailers
• It feels like five or six iterations of the concept and the physical elements of the show are incredibly modular

The running theme through the interview was collaboration and Asher explains how he and his team approach it “by establishing the framework of what matters and the idea that we're trying to articulate, the teams can come together and sort of ricochet and problem solve around it while maintaining that core principle.”

Toward the end of the interview, Asher gave us a few sneak peeks into future projects in the works. He said they are developing internally a lot of shows and experiences that are more hospitality-based or hotel-based, some that cross genres, i.e.; a dinner theater show, and projects that are more art-based. We look forward to seeing what’s next in the creative mind of Asher Young.

You can reach out to Asher Young, and see his creative works at cyi.studio

Also, check out his Instagram page @cy.studio