IMMERSIVE SPACE SERIES: OVERWORLD
Winner of Toronto Design Offsite Festival Awards Peoples Choice for Favourite New Work, Juror's Choice Award, DesignLines Magazine Top 100 Designs of Toronto Design Week
Project Team: JohnTaylor Bachman, Can Vu Bui, Vincent Calabro, Lane Rick and Katie Stranix
An installation for the 2016 Toronto Offsite Design Festival is built in a small room of a historic Toronto hotel. Given the provocative site, the installation creates two rooms, the lower a white room with a dropped ceiling, and the upper an immersive, reflective Overworld.
The dropped ceiling is low, awkward even; to stand comfortably, visitors must poke their heads through a hole in the dividing plane, into the Overworld. It’s a surreal atmospheric place. A pulsing bass emanates from the walls in synchronization with fading blue and red lights that rise and fall with a cavernous whistling sound that interrupts the bass, the occupants lose their physical bearing and enter an unknowable other world with its own light, time, sound and space.
Balanced between the two zones, the occupant confronts the thin line between the banal and the ephemeral. Overworld is where the spectacle undermines the real, and the relentless allure of intrigue hovers just out of reach.
