For Design Project 3, I have teamed up with Wirada Deerajviset and Stephen Wang. Each individual are very diversely different. What that means is that there is hardly any relation between each of them. My space is a typical “Friday-Night-Out” Dance Club; Wirada’s space alludes to her vision of Hell and Naraka (levels of Hell, in religious beliefs); and Stephen’s space being a Zen Garden where people play Go (a traditional chess-like game).
There were several ideas like a Haunted House, Scary Garden and the Halloween Dance Club, featuring a roller coaster and a combination of the aforementioned, which was ALMOST the hands-down decision. However, because the ideas were so weak, we had to break it down to less literal and direct approaches. Rather than Hell, Zen Garden, and Dance Club as a whole, we broke it down to the very small aspects of each, resulting in Fear, Peace, and Gathering respectively. With that, we were able to create a sacred ground with an underground maze with allusion to a story.
The story is titled, “The Ghost of Pagoda Valley”, it is about the strange disappearance of travellers when they explored the southern province of Valefor (fictional). These travellers would return after a time period (not uniform), but as a changed man, and unwilling to recount on the events that took place. This is a story I written recently as part of my own leisure.
There have already been some examples of similar spaces in films such as Indiana Jones and Armour of God II; or such global sites such as indigenous sacred grounds. In the sense of elemental aspects, fear in this case, we endorse films (yes, again) especially Saw II where the victims were escaping the seemingly unsolvable maze and hearing the various sounds and such. But each of these examples tells the same thing differently. One has an action/adventure feeling with broad daylight and the other is thriller/horror with an enclosed space and dark atmosphere.
But how are “we” going to tell this story to everyone? For this project, we considered rather than following the conventional narrative-movie storytelling, we decided to use more of an art form. In this case, we are using scenery and experiences; let the people tell themselves of their own story. This is because different people have different levels of imagination and for this reason; they would experience this space differently.
More in-depth information would be in the upcoming blogs.
