Video-based art installations are having a resurgence in New York City. If you’re not already a fan of the medium, below you’ll find five exhibitions currently on view that are sure to bring you into the fold. A few of these must-see shows close soon, so you’ll want to get a move on.

Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016
at Whitney Museum of Art
on view through February 5, 2017

Entering the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 feels like you’ve stumbled upon a moving image laboratory of sorts. The fastidiously curated group show is filled with cinematic experiments performed over the last 100 years. Color, light, music, touch, and darkness have been manipulated to confound and provoke. And, when the show is viewed as a whole, one can track technology’s influence on the medium. Highlights of the shoe include Bruce Conner’s CROSSROADS (1976), which features footage of the US’s underwater test explosion of an atomic bomb; Ben Coonley’s amusing and confounding video made with a 360-degree camera projected inside the ceiling of a cardboard geodesic dome; Dora Budor’s immersive, visitor-activated installation that suggests the amphibian rain scene of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia; and all the films in No Ghost Just a Shell, the project initiated by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe that invited artists to create videos starring the Japanese anime character Annlee. Also featured are works by Joseph Cornell, Andrea Crespo, Alex Da Corte, Oskar Schlemmer, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and more.

*****************

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest
at New Museum
Partially closes on January 15, with the second and third floor galleries remaining on view through January 22, 2017

Now through January 22 at the New Museum, step into the pulsating, hypnotic universe of Pipilotti Rist. Pixel Forest is the first major survey in New York of the pioneering Swiss artist, who has been experimenting with video art since the 1980s. Referring to her work as a “glorification of the wonder of evolution”, Pipilotti combines technology with biology, and mixes spirituality with carnality. The exhibit, which is organized by New Museum artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, is largely chronological with the artist’s early, single-channel works found on the second floor. As visitors ascend, they are greeted with more dazzling immersive environments, some of which invite viewers to lay on beds or cozy up with cushions.

*****************

Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, the Message is Death
at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem
on view through January 28

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise’s Harlem outpost is playing host to the first public exhibition of Arthur Jafa’s large-scale single-channel video work, Love is the Message, The Message is Death. A powerful 7-minute collage of racially charged found footage, the video reads like a crash course in African-American culture. Scenes of black musicians and leaders intercut with images of church choirs and acts of police harassment. Jafa’s film dances and sways with its subject matter and uses Kanye West’s rap-gospel masterpiece “Ultralight Beam” as a guiding force.

*****************

Tony Oursler: Imponderable
at Museum of Modern Art
on view through April 16

The paranormal, Harry Houdini, telekinesis, and 5-D cinema converge at MoMA courtesy of Tony Oursler. Tucked away in a corner gallery on the museum’s second floor is a pop-up theater where visitors can peep Oursler’s feature-length video Imponderable. The work taps into Oursler’s fascination with stage magic, spirit photography, and pseudoscience, and finds Houdini, scientists, mediums and con artists contesting the existence of spirits in the material world. The film features a cast that includes Kim Gordon, Jim Fletcher, Keith Sanborn, and Constance DeJong, and is screened in 5-D, which means the seats shake, among other things.

*****************

Manifesto
at Park Avenue Armory
on view through January 8

Julian Rosefeldt dusts off old art manifestos from the 20th century and gives them new life in his stunning and provocative video installation Manifesto. Created in collaboration with Cate Blanchett, the work is made up of 13 different films (or scenes), each featuring the Academy Award-winning actress in a different role, ranging from a TV anchorwoman to a homeless man to a funeral orator and more. In character, Blanchett performs the manifestos, which have been collaged together by art movement, as poetic monologues. While some of the texts included in Manifesto are over 100 years old, they feel incredibly relevant. Rosefeldt’s work approaches an age-old subject, the role of the artist in society, in an unexpected and refreshing way.

Manifesto is on view at Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall through January 8. If you plan on checking it out, we recommend allotting over 2 hours. Each film is 10 minutes and 30 seconds and deserves your undivided attention. For those unable to see it during its New York City run, the work is also installed at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Stuttgart, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, with plans for further travel. A 90-minute version of the work is also screening at the Sundance Film Festival at the end of this month. (UPDATE: Watch the trailer for the 90-minute film below)