Overworld; Immersive Space Series
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: Lane Rick with JohnTaylor Bachman, Can Vu Bui, Vincent Calabro, Katie Stranix
Photos: Johnna Arnold, Impart Photography
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.