It is no surprise, then, that MoFE is also more than one thing. He has worked in the world of finance - from venture capital to hedge funds - but he’s also been a traveling musician and on staff at a slew of theater productions of the experimental kind. By the time he was 5, his family had moved to Uzbekistan and then Moscow before landing in Tampa, Florida. In showing people something new, he says, MoFE is by definition offering a future experience.Ī graduate of Harvard Business School, Askaryan, who is ethnically Armenian, was born in Azerbaijan. “Our core mission is to show people something they’ve never seen before,” Askaryan tells Brooklyn Magazine. Previous exhibit-experiences since MoFE opened last June have included a riff on liminal spaces as well as a spooky virtual Halloween story set in Florida. (The evocation of “2001: A Space Odyssey” is not totally accidental.)ĭavid Askaryan is the CEO and founder of MoFE, which is based in Williamsburg and is the latest local take on the sort of immersive experiences that seek to stimulate all five senses while simultaneously catering to the Instagram crowd. What’s different here is how the folks at MoFE nudge you to that awareness - through a 20ish-minute guided meditation-poem with your eyes closed, followed by an equally long, surreal virtual reality experience featuring forests, fractals, splitting cells and one giant floating space fetus. It’s not, of course, a new point of view. Walk into the current exhibit at the Museum of Future Experiences (MoFE) and you will be asked to contemplate the ancient question: “Who am I?” The MoFE take is that we’re all connected, woven inextricably together in the great cosmic quilt. In addition to publishing Alyan’s poetry, The New Yorker reviewed “Tallahassee,” a short film Alyan created and stars in with Darine Hotait, where “a woman covers up her struggles, and finds herself disconnected at a family celebration.” The film was nominated for Best Narrative Short Film at the Cairo Shorts Film Festival last December. Kirkus Reviews called it “painful and joyous, sad and funny - impossible to put down.” Her sophomore novel, “The Arsonist’s City” (2021), shares a rich family story and a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East. Her 2017 debut novel, “Salt Houses,” won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. She holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University and has practiced part-time at NYU’s Counseling Center - an intense technical training that taught Alyan to navigate the tenuous emotions at play throughout her own writing. Her family moved to Kuwait but sought political asylum in the U.S. One poem titled “Moral Inventory” offers a particular gut punch: “Maybe I’m more like Manhattan than I want to admit: prettier when lit.”īorn in Carbondale, Illinois, Alyan also grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, Maine and Lebanon. There’s real power behind this Palestinian- American’s voice, encapsulated in stanzas of her acclaimed poetry volume “ The Twenty-Ninth Year,” an elegiac autobiography that leaps from war-torn cities in the Middle East to Brooklyn brownstones as easily as it does from alcoholism to recovery. At intimate readings hosted for Brooklyn’s literary community in her own backyard, Alyan can appear soft-spoken. Heart-wrenching yet delicate words from Williamsburg-based author, poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan have appeared everywhere from The New York Times and The Missouri Review to Poetry Magazine and Guernica.
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