The Imaginary Hotel

The Imaginary Hotel
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The Imaginary Hotel allowed visitors to occupy and design their ideal room within and fill it with personal content and inspiration. The installation architecture resembled a typical hotel room with its ubiquitous furniture and appliances. In contradiction to the isolated character of such a room though, the walls were constructed as a more open space reminding a theatrical stage and creating a link between inner and outer activity areas They functioned as projection screens and by choosing image, video and sound footage, sent from the net via the room TV menu, the visitors could then alter the standard interior and even hotel location. At the same time internet users could interfere by modifying or uploading further material through custom coded drag and drop interfaces simulating the room on the actual website and through search interfaces, which collected personal images from their hard disks. All of which allowed an easy and targeted exchange with the room itself. The website further provided a hotel lobby/chat lounge, from which users were able to ring up the telephone in the real hotel room. To achieve this a special web-telephone interface was coded, which transferred text messages from the website into voice on the gallery telephone and the answers back into text. A web cam was streaming real time video from the hotel to the website to constantly document the ongoing changes.

The metaphor of a hotel was chosen because of its given structure of an empty shell, in which the neutral rooms turn into a personal hideaway for a certain period of time. A hotel as such stands for an anonymous social melting pot in a constant state of flux - The Imaginary Hotel further mirrors digital travel in a distorted concept of space and time. It represents a virtual retreat accommodating permanently migrating residents. Similar to a blank canvas, the vacant room is successively populated and shaped by individuals. Real and virtual guests arrive, meet and disappear from out of nowhere and leave their personal traces, reflecting the seamless border between physical and imaginative places of being.

(Andrea Zapp)