It's a Bizarre World After All

A collective of artists got together to build otherworldly, immersive spaces. In the process, they invented something even wilder: meow wolf, a multimillion-dollar pillar of the experience economy that's now spreading its gonzo creativity across the country.

- By Aaron Gell. Photographs by Maciek Jasik

Happen to visit Convergence Station, the Denver outpost of the popular immersive-art empire meow wolf, the staff has one request: don't push the emergency call button on the elevator, unless there's a real emergency. "It happens at least once or twice a day," says Amanda Clay, the company’s chief exhibitions officer. In the 90,000-square-foot, five-story building, a team of 300 artists has created a series of beguiling, Wonkaesque spaces laced with interactive elements. Doors open onto other dimensions. Desktop computers and soda machines are seeded with hidden clues. Sit in a “mech robot navigator” and solve a puzzle, and a laser light show explodes in the vaulted ceiling overhead, a brilliant display known as “opening the wormhole.” But those elevator buttons? They’re mandated by law, and they really do connect to the fire department. “Once visitors start to get into it,” Clay explains, “they think they need to press every button.”

Such misunderstandings are probably unavoidable when your business model is based on upending visitors’ relationship with reality while “giving [them] agency over their experience,” in the words of Meow Wolf cofounder and former CEO Vince Kadlubek. Meow Wolf welcomes attendees to its three surrealist fun houses with a familiar-seeming entry point—a family home (House of Eternal Return, in Santa Fe, New Mexico), a supermarket (Omega Mart, in Las Vegas), or a transportation hub (Convergence Station)—before treating them to a multisensory experience marbled with comic-book, sci-fi, and horror-movie tropes, social satire, and enough tantalizing mysteries to confound Dana Scully.