Backslash Artist 2025
Niko Koppel is a visual journalist and multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, and emerging technologies. Koppel’s recent practice centers on using 3D capture tools to digitally preserve overlooked cultural heritage and endangered histories—documenting artifacts and environments before they disappear, so they may be valued in the present and experienced by future generations.
With over a decade as a journalist at the New York Times, Koppel brings investigative rigor into more conceptual frameworks. His projects often take the form of interactive installations that merge narrative and documentary into experimental, sensory experiences. One such work reconstructed survivors’ encounters with police-involved shootings through leaked NYPD evidence files, transforming raw data into an immersive environment of memory and competing testimony.
Blending art, journalism, and technology, Koppel aims to preserve hidden stories—from the human consequences of climate change to abuses of power—provoking new ways of witnessing and understanding, both analytically and emotionally.
Artwork in Progress
For Backslash, Koppel plans to create an immersive Mixed Reality (MR) installation that captures an unraveling of America.
Imagine walking the Las Vegas Strip, not as it is today, but as a fossilized, apocalyptic version of itself, akin to the ruins of Pompeii. A plaster statue of David lies toppled and a Waymo rusts amid towering trees draped in fashion knockoffs and discarded Air Jordans.
Through holographic three-dimensional artifacts integrated into a physical environment, viewers will navigate the uncharted consequences of political disarray, climate change, and social unrest, offering a visceral reflection of our turbulent present and uncertain future.
A time capsule of contemporary America and its psyche, each three-dimensional still life included, was created entirely by natural disasters and social forces captured from the scenes of hurricanes, wildfires, protests, and the forgotten corners of our country.
The archive includes dozens of objects including burned cop cars and reclaimed Confederate monuments in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, a Cyber truck vandalized on election day outside Trump Tower, and the scorched remains of McMansions destroyed in the Los Angeles fires.
These surreal and poetic scenes will be woven throughout the experience, inviting viewers to explore, as if on an archeological dig, both the decadence and fragility of our civilization. Each modern day fossil can be inspected and explored in detail at scale, immersively curated into a viewer’s surrounding environment through a wearable MR headset.
Working alongside Cornell faculty and students, Koppel will develop the artwork while exploring interactivity and user experience within the headset. Over the course of the year, the project may even evolve in real time, responding to emergent news events and capturing new artifacts to expand the archive as history unfolds. More than a static collection, it is a living, responsive document shaped by the news cycle and social consciousness. Through this effort, students and faculty will directly engage with the first draft of history, transforming unforeseen events into digital heirlooms.