Why You Need to Get Yourself to the Nearest Meow Wolf Portal and Jump In

Meow Wolf is an arts entertainment company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico dedicated to creating immersive experiences that transport audiences of any age into “fantastic realms of story and exploration,” according to Joanna Garner, who talked about how the former hole-in-the-wall operation is now punching holes into the multiverse nationwide with the help of a certain Game of Thrones writer. “Meow Wolf started out as a collective of artists really making art out of trash, which just goes to show you that you really can make any reality you want. The artists of Meow Wolf, they got George R.R. Martin [of] Game of Thrones to buy this old bowling alley and make it a permanent home, which is called the House of Eternal Return. Our mission is to inspire creativity in people’s lives through art, exploration, and play so that imagination will transform our worlds.”

A new location will be here soon. The grand opening for Meow Wolf in Texas was recently announced for July 14. “We are about to open our fourth permanent exhibition this July in Grapevine, Texas, which is near Dallas and is called the Real Unreal. And we’re not allowed to tell you anything about this story, but it is a real testament to the way we work in terms of collaboration with about 30 artists from North Texas all involved. And I can say that the Real Unreal and the exhibition that we just broke ground on in Houston [are aiming to] keep Texas weird. We can,” Garner assured.

James Stevenson, who recently came aboard the Meow Wolf team, added, “We’re expanding out pretty rapidly. And we are also working in a very different way with the communities and artists that we that we work with, both [within] our internal community and ourselves, but also the communities in all of the cities where we are expanding too, and setting up shop. So we’re really trying to engage artists to get much more involved in thinking very holistically about what they’re building with us.”

Each location inhabits a familiar enough space on the outside, like Santa Fe’s original bowling alley, Denver’s transit station, or Vegas’ grocery store. For Grapevine, it’ll be a retro recreational fave. “It’s actually based in a mall just outside of Dallas,” Stevenson said. “We’re leaning into the mall itself as a sort of destination, and trying to play with this reality unreality that gets people kind of excited and and engaged.”

Garner shares how Meow Wolf is aiming to build on what it’s done so far. “We’ve tried a lot of different things, sort of in service of figuring out how we communicate story to participants. And the question that I’m really interested in is: how do we create the circumstances for transformational experiences? Because it seems to me that we need them more than ever right now. And I think that personal transformation is the the key to how societal transformation happens.”

Stevenson was brought on to expand on Meow Wolf’s participatory story, “pick your own adventure” tenet. “We have embedded narrative throughout all over our exhibits. So there are characters that have very rich, complicated stories, they’re very fully developed. If you explore all of our exhibitions, you’ll find journals and photographs and all kinds of things that capture this very richly told story world. We do it through design interaction, we do it through costumed characters, we do it through holograms, we have artists of all stripes who come in and do live immersive theater,” he said. “It is essentially this very collectivist approach to to world building. It’s a collective approach to art and story-making. It also fundamentally includes participants and guests into the experience of being co-creators. You see these portals in all the work that we do, right? The whole idea is to keep drawing guests and participants into the story, to let you be the agent who is exploring, what the experience is.”

Garner took us back to the start about what the core of Meow Wolf has been since the opening of its first portal, the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “There’s kind of some key ingredients to what makes a transformational experience. Fundamentally, we say that it’s challenging a person’s beliefs, values, assumptions in some way,” she said. “For Meow Wolf, when people venture beyond their comfort zone, we know that transformation tends to happen when you’re in a place that is a little bit unfamiliar, unknown, maybe even uncomfortable. And then it opens these new pathways of possibility for you in your mind and maybe in your body. This is key: the transformation has to come from within.”

She continued, “And that’s annoying because as experience designers, we can’t make you have a transformational experience as much as we’d like. What I think is really interesting as a storyteller [and] writer is that stories are what stick. We tell the story of the transformational experience. I did this thing, I went here, I saw these people. I felt different when I left,” Garner explained. “What is the ‘why’ and ‘why am I here’ intellectually? ‘What is the story behind this world or experience or performance and why am I necessary here?’ This is on a base level, setting it up for the audience, and then on maybe a more metaphysical level, the idea that we would create as circumstances for people to answer this for their own life.”

I’ll never forget my first visit. It was New Year’s Eve a few years ago, and the moment above—where I was transported into a neon aquatic forest—is seared into my brain. I experienced a wonder, a complete surrender to a suspension of disbelief that I constantly chase when going to immersive activations.

“This is what we call the accessible unknown... a threshold for people to walk through and something they understand in this reality that helps kind of frame what the experience is as you move into the unknown,” Garner explained, referring to Meow Wolf’s varying entry points. It could be a refrigerator door or fireplace, “because unknown is scary. We as experience designers, immersive makers tend to have a little more tolerance for the unknown. In general, it is scary for us to move into unknown spaces, so [we’re] helping people ease into the mystery by giving them something that they’re familiar with. So in this case, it’s a house. And then in this story, you come in and you find out that the frame of the house holds the story of a family that accidentally broke open time and space when they’re trying to bring their son back from the dead. So it’s actually a pretty, like, dark story that gives some emotional resonance there. And when their experiment backfires, their house explodes from the familiar and the safe into the unknown.”

In Santa Fe, it’s more of an experimental experience—an evolving structure that sets up the house you initially enter. “And then there’s the charter, this ancient, multidimensional organization of order-keepers. They freeze the anomaly to prevent more disaster. The family’s gone and their dreams and fears and memories. Random thoughts manifest in physical space, connected through portals from places like their refrigerator. That’s the general story. And so it’s a it’s a forensic investigation, meaning that you, as the audience, are uncovering the story by looking at artifacts, reading things, and the deeper you go into the story, the more opportunities for connection with the space. So that’s really what the House does,” Garner explained, noting this is where “escape room” elements that don’t lead to a clear resolution creates confusion about Meow Wolf.

As the years have gone on, Garner and the Meow Wolf team have tried to anticipate how to move audiences through that initial itch to “figure out” the mystery. “There’s no real linear path to it, but we really try to figure out ‘how do we help people get into the story while not hand-holding them?’ So there is an expectation that’s set up. And then with that, the story really only exists for the most part in the house space itself. Once you go beyond the house, it’s just kind of random connections of the family. Maybe you realized there’s a lot of bottlenecks for reading material, you got one person with this diary, and they’re going to sit there and read it for an hour. So we’ve tried adding QR codes to things.” Garner reflected on what they’ve learned from House of Eternal Retrun. “That’s definitely something that we try to address in some of the other exhibitions and then everything’s in past tense.”

Bringing in more tech for those who do want to dig into the mythology artists create has been a feature of following locations like Omega Mart in Las Vegas. “Something we introduced in Omega Art is a big experiment we call the Boop system. It’s an RFID system because it gives you this card, your Mega Access pass. And basically you have these stations throughout the exhibition that allow you to boop and get more information, but also start to engage with the characters and actually directly affect the space based on your actions,” Garner said, adding an example. “There’s a really cool moment where if you align with the resistance rising up against Dream Corp, you can align yourself with them and actually take over all of Omega Mart. So people are just in there doing their selfies, and you actually can change the whole lighting system and video, which is really cool.”

Still, she notes that the team realizes it still creates an incentive for a game that’s not entirely there, which Meow Wolf fans get but competitive-natured general audiences might find hard. “It really creates sort of a gamification of the exhibition that we don’t really intend, because we really wanted to give people just a new way to engage with the space. But you know, of course people coming into an unknown are, like, ‘What do I do with this thing? Oh, it must be a game. There must be a way to win it.’ So then you would just have people go to the space and then boop everything, ‘and then I’ll win! All right, what’s my prize?’ We’re your prizes. You had a good time at Meow Wolf,” she laughed. “So I think we’ve been trying to figure out, like, what is the balance between creating a game experience which people love ... while also not setting people up for disappointment.”

“Something else that works really well in Convergence Station are these beautiful moments of embodied creation. What does co-creation look like? We have these moments that I think we plant here. That, to me, really shows what is possible for embodied co-creation.” Garner gave an example using my favorite structure, the Cosmohedron. “You get seven people to sit in these spots and everybody puts their hand on the wall on these little sensors, and you trigger this amazing light and sound display. The story is that you’re activating these deep cellular memories, which does tie in with the larger story. This is a really beautiful moment of transformation through co-creation. It’s so cool.”

Memories are a huge part of the experience in ways that scrolling on your phone or watching things in VR just can’t capture. You make memories that last and you want to share with others for when they go there. And it’s on theme with Meow Wolf’s messaging, which makes it such an experience that you want to share. “There’s this back story: when these worlds converged, their memories were scattered and so an economy rose around trading memories to reclaim what you might have lost, and also gain new perspective and empathy. And so you can follow that in the world. It really is a thread of how to engage with them. So we’ve got this memory economy with memories scattered everywhere and all of these ways to interact with memory in the space.”

Creating a space you can’t wait to return to—with corners and areas you may have missed the first time, or interactions that happen spontaneously—really functions to bring to the surface that need for human connection and how tech can enhance it as opposed to locking us away from one another. “There are these beautiful moments of connection with characters. And if you do play through all the way to the end, which we know is a commitment, you do get a really cool payoff of impacting the story,” Garner said. “[It’s] definitely a cool experiment in terms of technology and the way to interact with the space. And the challenge for Meow Wolf always is: how do we marry the story with the physical environment, and how can we use tech to actually activate that and bring it alive, as opposed to pulling it apart?”

Visit Meow Wolf portals in the following locations:

House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico,

Convergence Station in Denver, Colorado

Omega Mart in Las Vegas, Nevada (AREA15)

And coming soon:

Meow Wolf’s the Real Unreal, opening July 14 in Grapevine, Texas; there’s also a Houston portal in the works.

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