Mike Carnevale
Founder + Creative Director, CARNEVALE
Advisory Board Member, The Hip Hop Museum and Creator + Executive Producer, Virtual THHM

by Kate Harvie, Contributing Writer for The Hip Hop Museum (originally published June 2023)

What are the fundamentals of Hip Hop?

Besides the Five Elements (DJ’ing, Beatboxing, Breakdancing, Graffiti Art, MC’ing), Hip Hop has always been about taking what is there (including technology), working where space is available (subway stations, on the streets), and making everything better. 

Reinventing. Renavigating. Revolutionizing.

Where The Hip Hop Museum is concerned, these are done in all that we do. Since 2015, when his team created our first virtual museum (entirely on mobile, optimized for mobile, and in full 3D, btw), we have been privileged to work with Mike Carnevale, founder and creative director of CARNEVALE. I had the honor of interviewing him earlier this month, me in New York, and Mike at his office in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Beyond his role as an advisory board member, Mike and his team have created an enhancement of THHM’s first concept (digital before physical), and it’s available for everyone to experience in beta. 

The Virtual THHM is open for everyone. 

Hip Hop has always been on the cutting edge of technology. Of course, the Official Record of Hip Hop offers a virtual museum. While it’s a virtual environment, the experience is entirely relative to those on land. Mike told me, “In our early conversations eight years ago, we first asked ‘how do we use technology to reach a greater audience?’” 

CARNEVALE and the THHM are not the first, of course, to use tech. Hip Hop DJs were the first to apply technology to change songs, use drum machines, and sample. 

Using Spatial, industry leader in gaming technology, because it is the best platform available, Mike, Jocelyn Barnes (Project Manager), Matt Medonis (UX Designer), Kenton Reynolds (3D Artist), and Erion Adams (3D Developer) have built a first version of one of the THHM’s core principles: available for all and always evolving. “Millions of people around the world,” Mike said, “can access something that, back in the day, only people in New York could.” 

The building structure on Exterior Street will be built once. The Virtual Museum will always evolve.

Hip Hop has always been on the cutting edge, and now that “technology has caught up with our vision,” opportunity and progression can really take off. Mike and I discussed why the Virtual Museum is open while in beta: as much as this is for visitors, it’s also a valuable tool for the museum leadership to learn how the team can educate, exhibit, and broadcast.

Accuracy is one of the fuel’s ingredients here. Mike told me, “We are creating subway trains as they appeared and operated during 50 years of Hip Hop.” This means how they were graffitied, how the doors and seats looked, the way the cars were designed. Mike went on: “We are responsible for preserving this history accurately. The subway car used in 1978 will be shown with the graffiti on it in 1978, not 1983.” And the people said, Amen.

The subway is fundamental in Hip Hop community and artistry, visual and audio. It was (and still is) a visual for the THHM website (which was first designed and created by CARNEVALE and is today produced and enhanced by Growth Skills). Our virtual space is “infinitely scalable,” and today’s four worlds will one day be thousands.

Here’s a glimpse of the experience when you visit, whether you use your trackpad or your keyboard. After you enter, pass through a long, blue hallway (through a whole lotta panels), descend (down a staircase), transverse through the subway station lobby, arrive at the elevator, enter, choose a floor, and teleport:/

Subway: Let it be said (by a longtime NYC resident) that the lobby resembles a subway station’s visual and audio experience it’s uncanny. Only things missing are Bikram hot temperatures and garbage.

Club: There are genuine posters on the walls of this multi-leveled spot, with a snack bar, VIP room, and space for DJs to spin (which happened last summer when TribeXR DJ Phoenix performed live and virtually).

Music Studio: Surrounded by portraits, artwork, the view from atop our construction site in the Bronx, you’ll enter a studio space complete with piano, drums, and keyboard before you visit the engineering room. You can learn details about the donated (to our Archives and Collections) art hanging in the hallways. You’ll see the wood panels that comprise the floor, and the physical details of the drum kit. Music is playing while you maneuver like you’re in a recording studio.

Donor Gallery: From the high glass ceiling to multiple salons, you’ll swear you dropped by an art gallery. Photos, paintings, and sketches have been installed, a soundtrack is playing, and you can learn the background stories of displayed work and the artist’s origins from audio conversations with donors like photographers Michael Benabib and Piotr Sikora and Sharpism artist Arm of Casso.

You know you want to visit.

With the technology, skills, and insight of the CARNEVALE team, virtual reality truly provides “the power to transport our visitors to any time and place in Hip Hop History.” Mike reiterated how “one of the basic philosophies of the virtual museum is to provide experiences that are not possible to create in the physical world.” Among these “amazing moments” (and many more were discussed by Mike and me) that could be built are:

• Being in the kitchen with Grand Master Flash and Fab 5 Freddy in legendary movie “Wild Style,”
• Sitting in the front row at the Kennedy Center and watch Nas perform Illmatic with the National Symphony Orchestra,  
• Attend the video shoot of 2Pac’s “California Love” and save an edit with you in it,
• Paint graffiti in the trainyards with the game’s legends, and so many more.

There are so many more experiences to create in the virtual museum because possibilities in Hip Hop are endless, stories are always coming up, and technology – like THHM – continues to evolve. 

Spend as much time as you can in the Virtual Museum. You can be active in our beta effort by sharing your feedback on your current experiences and ideas for future ones. Please email all of those here.

We are overjoyed and overwhelmed by the possibility of multiple ways people can interact with the museum. It will be – correction: it already is – possible for people around the world to interact with the museum. Check out PBS’s coverage (our segment begins at 01:39) here. Shouts to Mike and his team. Visit the Virtual Museum anytime, anywhere and let us know how it goes.