Imaginary Forces

Architects of Experience: Imaginary Forces and the New New Media

It's after dusk when the dragon slithers along the Fremont Street in Las Vegas, it's body writhing to the sounds of heavy guitar rifts. The mythological beast is soon followed by a school of fish swimming across an aquamarine sky. It might sound like one of those not-so-sober experiences that happened in Vegas and should stay in Vegas, but the scene actually represents the way one company is melding architecture and multimedia to create a new technology of experience. It takes place nightly in Vegas' once-stagnant city center, now renewed and revived as the Fremont Street Experience, on a four-block-long LED canopy called Viva Vision that spans the length of an outdoor pedestrian mall.

This concept for the six-minute sequence, titled The Drop (after its theme, a drop of water, was brought to life by the creators at Imaginary Forces (IF), a multifaceted entertainment and design agency in Los Angeles and New York. The Drop comes from the company's specialized Experience Design wing – an innovative sector that includes tech-savvy creators with varied architecture and design backgrounds. Benjamin Bratton, a strategist at IF's Los Angeles office who also teaches Architectural History and Theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the University of California Los Angeles, sums up the division’s approach with a pithy little catchphrase: "Architecture is the new new media."

This notion may seem odd, considering the production of architecture dates back to prehistoric times. Isn't it just about constructing a space? Think again. A key shift has taken place since the hunter-gatherer days – namely, the advent and wide-scale proliferation of film and computer based systems. "Now you see things in interfaces more," says IF's New York creative director, designer Karin Fong, "Things are framed in metaphors for you on the screen and that seeps into life." Today, a space can be more than a mere commercial or residential shelter – it can open new dimensions and spacially create the frame-by-frame immersive experience of watching a movie in a dark theater. The activity of movie-going forms a launching pad for Experience Design, Fong explains, only "now you have the extra element of actually physically immersing someone." IF's decade-old mission to create high-concept title sequences and special effects helps explain its penchant for bringing film techniques into other domains. "IF has always been a blend of creative and technology," says founding partner/producer Chip Houghton. This agency's cinematic arm does still create stylized credits and content for films like Minority Report, but it has since expanded to include varied artistic, entertainment and branding projects, such as The Drop.

Fong, who worked on the mammoth Las Vegas project, recalls pedestrians' intense initial reactions to this cinematic experience embedded within the exterior architectural space. "The first night, during the grand opening, people were lying down [on the sidewalk] looking at it." The project demonstrates the way Experience Design's practice embraces elements not only of film, but also of sculpture. "You can never see all of it at once," Fong observes. "You have to travel around it. By its nature, it's time-based." These qualities, along with the use of animation – "a great medium for a Surrealist," Fong says – facilitate immersive experiences that remove audiences from the everyday.

A Surrealist such as Rene Magritte would have had a field day with Holiday Home, another prominent Experience Design project. By interweaving the literal and figurative the installation asked its viewers/participants questions like, "When is a house a home?" producing a kind of futuristic architectural variation of the Belgium artist's famous painting, Ceci n'est pas une pipe ("This is not a pipe"). Commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Holiday Home was a 453-square-foot "house" made of light, real-time motion capture and digital projection. The creative team started with and archetypal "Monopoly house" structure and explored the experience of escapism as it related to that space. Visitors were bathed in purple and fuchsia light as they walked through its orthogonal shape and into a Spartan venue. Like some sleek minimal summer home for Superman constructed from remnants of Krypton, Holiday Home was the byproduct of a new nostalgia for high-concept minimalism, explains Noah Olmstead, an artist, architect and aspiring music video director who started working for IF last year.

For Olmstead, the difference between Experience Design and contemporary interactive art is one of feeling. "Experience Design is super emotionally based. It doesn't have to have a button or a sensor. It's the texture on the floor, the shape of a space." When one walks through such an installation, the idea is that the combination of the space's form, layout, lighting and sounds will trigger memories or sensations. With Holiday Home, Olmstead felt it important to contribute a concept of color, tied to sunset and early morning, that would evoke holiday memories. He also wanted to incorporate his own personal sense of the home as an ideal setup for portrait photography. Think Sears for avant-garde futurists.

Bratton points out that this form of architectural immersion has already become a key part of branding, citing the success of the Apple store as an example of "the experience of smelling, touching, physically being part of " a corporate identity. Similarly, old architectural forms like banks have evolved to adapt to technologies like ATMs and the Internet, freeing up physical space in which meaningful experiences can be created. "Now I'm going to want my bank to be a place that’s worth going to, engaging, memorable, a destination," Bratton explains. He and his collaborators at IF view architecture as a literal and metaphorical screen, a sort of "clear channel," through which they are free to broadcast content that makes a real-time experience. And in an era of mixed and plentiful messages, where space and airtime are precious, architecture is not just a "new new media," but also a valuable one. Bratton adds, "It's the one place in the world where you can say what you need to say with no interruption in a completely tangible physical experience."