Awesome Art And Music Festival TRANSFIX Opens At Resorts World Las Vegas

Imagine a pulsating art and music festival incorporating elements of Coachella and Burning Man, but one that plays for six months on the Las Vegas Strip. And imagine that you can enjoy hours of art and entertainment from installations by over 50 world-famous artists for less than $70 a ticket.

No need to imagine what you can see, hear, and experience at TRANSFIX. From April through September 2023, TRANSFIX will launch light and music into the Nevada sky from the back lot of the $3.5 billion Resorts World hotel.

“We are thrilled to be partnering with TRANSFIX and for the opportunity to bring such a unique offering to our guests,” said Scott Sibella, President of Resorts World Las Vegas. “This experience will truly elevate and redefine the immersive experience approach. We cannot wait to welcome our guests and visitors alike to this never-before-seen attraction.”

The first experience guest encounter at TRANSFIX is six minutes in a sound and light tunnel. Then there’s Marco Cochran’s Re-Evolution, a statue of a woman 5 stories tall and weighing 32,000 pounds that towers over the show. With 16 motors in her chest, guests slowly realize that the lighted statue is ‘breathing.’

Then there is KiNK / AXION, an enormous pyramid of pulsating light. It puts out a hypnotic trance show synchronized to pre-recorded music three times a night. The art pieces have their own sound environments, and local DJs will play music as well.

TRANSFIX is the world’s largest touring immersive art experience. In addition to bringing in a new generation of guests to Resorts World, TRANSFIX also provides its artists with income from works they would otherwise have to warehouse.

The show was developed by a pair of Burning Man veterans and experiential entrepreneurs, Michael Blatter and Tom Stinchfield. The two worked with the show’s curator, who looked at a thousand artists before trimming the list to 50.

“I met my business partner at Burning Man 10 years ago. We had been going to the desert and admiring the art,” says Stinchfield, now Cofounder and Chief Revenue Officer of TRANSFIX. “We were always pitching the artists to different brands at industry art events.”

Stinchfield says that in our society, “Artists are not supported. At Burning Man, Coachella, EDC, it costs a lot to get things built and unbuilt.” The creators of these large, elaborate works “have to warehouse them when a brief show is over. Where do you store a six-story structure?” asks Stinchfield.

“We realized that after befriending these artists over the years, there was an opportunity to bring this art to be seen and appreciated by more people.”

At TRANSFIX, “The artists are the stars of our show. Music festivals are music with side dish of art, we are art with a side dish of music.”

The goal, explains Stinchfield, is to inspire creativity and create an ecosystem where artists will be seen by more people and get paid. “It’s a content creator’s playground. We feel this will be appreciated by so many different kinds of audiences, from parents who bring kids to museums to partygoers. What we want to create is inspiration and a sense of awe.”

Is this “immersive art” like the popular Van Gogh and Bob Marley shows touring the country?

Stinchfield says “Those shows are basically four walls and a projector. At TRANSFIX you have to complete it yourself—the person becomes part of it, there are buttons to push or wheels to turn. It can really change a person, someone who’s been in museums where everything says do not touch, we let people be enlivened by living workings of art. Touch the art!”

The TRANSFIX arrangement with Resorts World is a revenue share, with guests buying tickets, drinks, food, merchandise, and sponsorships. The show will offer several bars in its four-acre space, including artist-designed speakeasies as well as on-site food from Resorts World outlets like Mulberry Street Pizza.

Timed tickets (at 20-minute intervals) are $59 for adults on weekdays (Tuesdays through Thursdays), $69 on weekends, Friday, Saturday and Sunday until 1 AM. There will also be separately ticketed events, such as concerts, in the space.

Support for the show will come from what Stinchfield calls a strong digital and social media presence, as well as billboards and taxi-top ads in Las Vegas. A tantalizing taste of the art installations will also be provided to passing drivers and to guests in 10,000 nearby hotel rooms.

When the six-month engagement is over, artists and technicians will supervise a massive move to a new TRANSFIX site, most likely in Los Angeles or Austin, TX.

Christopher Bauder, whose KiNK / AXION is part of the show’s logo, studied designing with computers at the Arts Institute of Berlin. He has since shown his work all over the world.

He says he is not interested in “creating art for sale or collecting. My aim is to present it to people as an experience. It’s not made for a museum.” Considering this, Bauder says, “It’s a very good match with TRANSFIX. It’s a new form of art outside the gallery or collector space.”

For example, his piece KiNK / AXION has toured in Beijing and Belgium. With the agreement with TRANSFIX to keep it up for six months, Bauder gets paid a monthly fee and the arrangement takes the sales side off his hands. “I’m happier to be on the art side than the business side.”

“It is a big risk they are taking on this scale,” Bauder says of TRANSFIX. “But I know there’s an audience—my tiny exhibition DARK MATTER, in just 1000 square meters in Berlin, attracted 400,000 people in two years. People want to spend their money on a good experience, not on stuff.”