- New alliances
We feel that the act of dreaming is critical to the collective consciousness of our society. By dreaming, we imagine new worlds full of alternate possibilities.
If Aldo Rossi’s monuments were about framing space in the effort to establish a shared memory of what has happened in the city, the dream palace might be considered an “anti-monument” tasked with the goal of catalyzing a collective imagination about what is yet to come.
By packaging this experience into a freestanding superbox, the installation might travel to key spaces in the city where dreaming is most urgent - public plazas, commercial centers, healthcare facilities, and housing districts.
What constitutes a space for dreaming? Most importantly, it must separate us from reality - from the familiar. Spatial tricks help to detach us from the familiar. Possibilities include utilizing forced perspective optical illusion techniques such as a formal re-shaping of the room, a reversal of ground and ceiling planes, perspectivally distorted digital graphic appliqués, a concealed layering of natural and electronic audio loops, and artificial scents.
This project began as a temporary installation in a janitorial closet of an art gallery. It offered a small porthole where visitors could crawl through from a familiar world (the art gallery) into an unexpected space merging physical and virtual environments. The site-specific sculpture was peer-reviewed, and selected by a jury for installation in 2015. Since then, the project was selected by a university jury for public presentation in a forthcoming symposium.
The original installation provided a small opening for viewers to access the interior, helping to position the head at ground level looking up. Once inside, the viewer must remain lying down due to spatial constraints, surrounded by a scene of skies and cumulus cloud pillows. Looking up from the floor, the viewer experiences a 360 degree view of soft glowing image of rolling grassy hills far in the distance in the manner of a three-dimensional computer desktop background image.
Dream Palace’s intent is to establish a narrative of escapism, however once in the space the viewer might wonder whether they are supposed to be escaping from the banality of our built environment, or escaping from our increasingly digitized world of screens and electronics. Nevertheless, the Dream Palace situates itself between the real and the virtual: a seemingly infinite space contained within a tiny room.
The structure performs as a fixed armature for an individual viewer, and is inspired by Rossi’s urban monuments, ‘90’s cyber culture, vernacular telephone booths, and Sottassian furniture. “An early example of the extension of buildings through media of communication is the telephone booth--a building of minimal size extended into global dimensions.” - Hans Hollein, “Everything is Architecture”
