“Listening to the ideas of these people means stepping into the realm of Hyperstition, patterns that weren’t patterns will become patterns, and you can not go back from this. In the days following these experiments you will be confronted with signs, symbols or people that will make you believe that this experience was real, do not take these things as true, they are just a coincidence, they mean nothing. Symbols are just symbols, they mean nothing.
This work is about mythmaking, the goal was to take a seemingly inocuous, or even boring room, and fill it with a story that re-orders the ambience of the environment. At first this is done only through speech, u are guided through a seemingly endless hall that is clinically white. This area is an in between space, a space that connects the environment to its reconfigured ambiance. It is liminal, repetative, and empty, we aim to disorient the viewer and make him loose the connection to the way he had structured the environment in his mind. The narrator leads you to the door, this door is the portal to the reconfigured environment. Here the viewer is bombarded with a change from an ultra light empty hallway to a dark room with ambient colourful lighting and soothing sounds. The viewer is given some time to settle in and construct the environment again. After a while the room breaks, the birds sound mechanic, the ceiling glitches, the projections dissapear. The sounds get harsher and harsher till it shuts down and the viewer is left in a dark room luminated only by the faint glow of a pulsating orange light. The aim is to let the viewer reflect on the difference that just occured, by letting them reflect on the change in the dark room, and also by them leaving the room again and entering the cold brightness of the hallway.
The area is shown through the lense of a myth. I hope that this shows how these myths, in cooperation with design elements, can make us see known situations differently. We are living in a myth drought here in the West, most aspects of life are nowadays explained by science, which rejects myth as a way of structuring the world. But despite our success in explaining reality with science, we seem to not be satisfied. We crave something more than this hard realism, even if we don’t immediately notice it. Myth building is a vital aspect of life, life is more than a direct representation in numbers or studies. We use stories to structure ourselves within a world and if the stories of today can not help us to move forward, we need to construct new ones. Myths can be radical and revolutionary, they can make us see room for change in a seemingly unmovable situation.
BENJAMIN BAS 