Dreaming with the Archives Brooklyn Bridge Park

Dreaming with the Archives is a public art exhibition by Kinfolk that transforms Brooklyn Bridge Park into a canvas for radical imagination through augmented reality (AR). This groundbreaking exhibition invites visitors to experience digital monuments to Brooklyn's layered histories — that exist atop and surrounding the park — while engaging with the current landscape and inspiring futures re-dreamed

As you move through the park, your mobile device becomes a portal through which to encounter immersive augmented reality monuments created by visionary artists Ari Melenciano, Olalekan Jeyifous, Kiyan Williams, Wangechi Mutu, Jeremiah Ojo, and Hank Willis Thomas. Each of the artists created site-specific artworks to honor the abundant flora, fauna, agriculture, skilled laborers, — enslaved andfree — and the sounds that make up the rich cultural history and ecology of Brooklyn and the African diaspora.

Dreaming with the Archives invites us all to imagine new futures for our public spaces — futures grounded in our shared pasts and radical possibility. Juneteenth 2025 marks the opening of a portal in public space for New York City to engage with our dreams of liberation and the stories powering our collective memory, through the Summer.

Presented in collaboration with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, this exhibition marks the inaugural moment of Kinfolk Tech’s yearlong, multi-city initiative, Dreaming with the Archives, activating imaginations and preserving stories of place through art and technology across New York City, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.

About The Works

Littorhythmia: ECO-4727 by Olalekan Jeyifous

Littorhythmia: ECO-4727 is an augmented reality installation situated within the tidal salt marsh and historic pile field of Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 1, a site where estuarine ecology and infrastructural memory converge. Part cybernetic archive, part floating  biome, and part ancestral shrine, it extends the speculative pedagogy of my New York Institute of Aetherism and Alchemy (NYIAA) series. Named from littoral (shoreline) and rhythmia (cadence), Littorhythmia evokes a sentient, rhythm-driven body shaped by sedimented memory—water, labor, ceremony, and circuitry interwoven within the tidal breathing of this evolving shoreline.

Birds of Unfeathers by Ari Melenciano

Birds of Unfeathers is an Augmented Reality experience where diasporic birds fly in patterns shaped by Venus and Mars, carrying Pan-African rhythms that resonate across borders, memory, and ancestral frequency.birds become the vessels of evolving sonic landscapes, carrying the rhythms and sounds of Pan-African cultures across time and space. Their calls, influenced by diasporic instrumentation and melodies, are sampled, layered, and transformed, reflecting a continuous journey of sonic migration across seas. Kinetic Rhizomes explores how sound travels and transforms, weaving culture, history, time, and memory into a dynamic, ever-changing soundscape.

Bibi Bihari by Wangechi Mutu

Bibi Bahari, was inspired by the mythological Nguva of East Africa or Mami Wata, which depict water creatures, often female, that inhabit the minds and lore of many seaside cultures. People have always feared and revered water; In fact, the way humans have conquered their fear and understanding of the great seas and the majestic rivers is through the imagination - by inventing powerful, unfathomable characters that give shape to these imaginary manifestations and explain why we need to be cautious, to respect and take care of our water bodies. Bibi Bahari is a character that evokes the place, the conditions, the mystical symbolism of the ocean, from which She and all life emerges.

Johnny Joe’s Oyster House by Jeremiah Ojo

At the intersection of Prospect Street and Stewart’s Alley in Brooklyn—now buried beneath a pillar of the Brooklyn Bridge—once stood Johnny Joe’s Oyster House, a thriving Black-owned business run by John and Louisa Britton Joseph, a formerly enslaved couple from Martinique. Opened in 1825 with a bold $1,600 investment, their oyster house was not only a celebrated culinary hub serving champagne and Blue Point oysters, but also a radiant beacon of Black entrepreneurial freedom in a time and place still entangled in slavery. For forty years, Johnny Joe’s offered space for joy, community, and resistance—a living monument to resilience and self-determination. This AR monument honors that submerged history, reimagining their legacy through a portal inspired by the mythical Atlantis and the Josephs’ Caribbean roots. Within this dreamscape, figures float and dance in celebration, inviting us to feel the buoyancy of a Black space that once was—and to imagine the radical possibility of what public space can become.

Bloom How You Must by Kiyan Williams

Insurrection ( A Proposed Monument to Amaranth / Pigweed ) features a towering Amaranth plant bursting through the pavement along the Brooklyn waterfront, standing tall amongst the glass skyscrapers of the city. The digital artwork stages an insurrection of flora invading the iconic Manhattan skyline.  Colloquially referred to as pigweed, Amaranth is ubiquitous in New York, blossoming in the vacant lots and cracked sidewalks that constitute contemporary urban ruins. Despite its designation as an invasive, undesirable species within the Western imagination, the plant is significant within histories of settler colonialism and the global maritime economies that shaped the modern world. First observed along the Brooklyn waterfront in 1879, Amaranth seeds arrived in New York City in the 19th century, buried in the ballast of slave ships carrying human cargo and colonial goods, and took root in the discarded stones along the water's edge. In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica the plant was cultivated by indigenous peoples before Spanish colonizers prohibited its use and growth. Despite historic and contemporary attempts at its eradication, Amaranth continues to flourish throughout the globe, growing even in nutrient-deprived soils, evolving to become resistant to pesticides, and standing as a symbol of survival against colonial violence.  

All Power to All People by Hank Willis Thomas

All Power to All People is a monumental and provocative artwork combining the Afro pick and the Black Power salute, both icons of Black identity and empowerment. When Hank conceived of a monumental Afro pick with a raised fist, he wanted to make an object that spoke specifically to African Americans, illustrative of the artist's longstanding investigation into the role public art plays in shaping collective discourse and societal values
This 24-by-10-foot tall Afro pick is topped by a hidden platform providing a stage for those performing with the piece. Hank notes, "| was thinking of Claes Oldenburg by blowing up an item that was helpful to me when I was a kid with an Afro, and turning it into something monumental."

The Last Farmer by Kinfolk Tech

This site-specific augmented reality project brings to life the forgotten agricultural history of Black farmers in Brooklyn through an immersive mobile experience at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The monument transforms the modern park setting into a thriving vegetable garden filled with crops that once grew abundantly throughout Brooklyn's soil—cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, squash, and corn—cultivated through generations of Black agricultural knowledge and practice before urbanization forever altered the landscape. The experience guides park visitors through a narrative of "the last farmer," representing countless individuals whose agricultural traditions were systematically erased by waves of urbanization and development but persist (e.g. Brooklyn Packers, Oko Farms, East New York Farms). As visitors move through different areas of the park, they unlock features allowing them to interact with the virtual crops—harvesting vegetables, learning about traditional growing techniques, and hearing oral histories from descendants of Brooklyn's Black farming community. This project honors not just the agricultural prowess of historical Black farmers, but invites reflection on what was lost through displacement and creates a space for remembering and celebrating these vital contributions to Brooklyn's heritage.

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