While most people associate 3D video with Hollywood blockbusters and $17 ticket stubs, in New York City over the weekend I was lucky enough to catch “Ouroboros: The History of the Universe,”–for free!–at the ISE Cultural Foundation in SoHo.

The installation is an awe-inspiring 3D video environment that showcases the more poetic side of the medium: its ability to physically and emotionally immerse a viewer in an image.  The main event is a giant wrap-around screen set against a long wall and its adjacent sides at the head of a bare room.  The video projected on the screen flashes layers of images in rapid, seemingly random, succession.  Each layer is colorized either red, blue, or green, making certain images recede and others pop out at you as your polarized 3D glasses discern the illusion of depth.

Three other screens project undulating geometric patterns.  The videos have no beginnings, middles, or ends (Ouroboros is the mythic symbol of a serpent forming a circle by eating its own tail).  The rhythm instills a sensation of time and space that calls attention to the fleeting cycle of birth, life, death, and re-birth that defines a universal truth we might never fully understand.

Through April 23rd at the ISE Cultural Foundation, 555 Broadway, at Prince Street..