By Jesi Khadivi

Warren Neidich’s public intervention on the façade of The Mark Hotel, a landmark building on East 77th Street in New York, creates a sense of movement and impermanence. It uses simple, straightforward language that evokes both the iconic hotel vacancy signs that once flickered along mid-century American roadsides and the complex sociopolitical dynamics of urban space. The sharp contrast of these glowing neon lights with the surrounding urban landscape emphasizes the tension between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence.

Created in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, NO VACANYCY (2022) responds to a cultural moment marked by social isolation, business closures, empty streets, urban flight, and, ultimately, resilience and renewal. Yet Neidich’s work resists being read solely through the lens of a public health crisis. Reflecting on the commission, The Mark Hotel owner Izak Senbahar says ‘Post-COVID-19, I wanted to message the world that New York was very much alive. I always had this obsession with roadside neon “No Vacancy” motel signs. I spoke to Warren about it, and he created the sign and brilliantly misspelled it by including “NYC” and made it intermittently blink “No, Vacancy, NYC.”’ The words in Neidich’s 20-foot-tall installation are at once clear and elusive – they come into focus only to disappear seconds later. These alternating terms do not merely signify available rooms, but gesture more broadly towards questions about how we physically occupy space and psychically position ourselves within the city.

‘NO VACANYCY,’ Neidich said during a phone conversation from his New York City studio, ‘is a call to be engaged with the world around us.’ A heightened connection with the fluctuations of our surroundings – both physical and virtual – is a central concern in the American artist’s multidisciplinary practice. Known for his ‘neuroaesthetic’ approach, Neidich uses a variety of methods, including photography, installation, writing, and teaching, to investigate how media environments, language, and urban spaces influence the brain and mind.

His projects often critique the ways digital technologies alter cognitive processes, memory, and identity. For example, the monumental suspended sculpture Rumor to Delusion (2019) comprises diagrammatic clusters of neon words and names related to disinformation and fake news that visually recall both the iCloud and the connectome, an intricate network of neural connections existing within the brain. Other works like A Proposition for an alt-Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other #2 (2023) similarly evoke neural networks in their juxtaposition of reproductions of classical statuary with a pulsating neon cloud of emojis, text, arrows, and squiggles. The figures’ missing appendages reappear as colorful ‘phantom limbs,’ referencing the phenomenon in which individuals vividly perceive a missing limb as still present – an example of cognitive remapping, where the physical and psychic bodies realign.

Neon advertisements boomed in early 20th-century Paris before making their way across the Atlantic to dominate mid-century America’s vernacular architecture and visual landscape. Developing into one of the most potent symbols of the modern city, they had the contradictory appeal of simultaneously embodying an optimistic urban modernity and a darker dystopian underbelly. Artists such as Cerith Wyn Evans have described neon as possessing ‘a nostalgic sense of an obsolescent future,’ yet Neidich’s use of the medium seems less concerned with cultural nostalgia than the temporality and materiality of neon itself. As an element, neon is always present yet temporarily incarnated as light, and while it’s intrinsically associated with mass culture and industrialization, neon lighting is nonetheless an artisanal craft that is blown by mouth and shaped by hand. For Neidich, neon, which has been a mainstay of his artistic practice for decades, is more than just a medium – it is a metaphor for the dynamic, mutable nature of urban existence and the brain. In NO VACANYCY, he uses it to bring together the city’s physical space with the cognitive and emotional landscapes it shapes. It compels us to reconsider the spaces we inhabit – physically, psychologically, and emotionally. The piece invites us to ask: how do we occupy the cities around us, and how do those cities, in turn, occupy us?

Jesi Khadivi is a writer and curator based in Berlin.