Check into the Hotel Chelsea for a social VR experience that expands the legacy of NYC's historic landmark into a virtual venue & maker-space, where users are invited to take up residence in its haunted rooms to explore its storied past and craft legends anew within its hallowed halls.
This project seeks to animate the poetry, art, and music scarred into the Chelsea's walls and renew the bohemian dream of a space that cultivates and nurtures creativity, birthing a new virtual afterlife for the physical space that has been silenced by the city's merchant greed.
My approach will pick up the torch from the Chelsea Hotel community in Second Life's digital twin of the building, both architecturally and ideologically, where its authentic spirit still glows with occasional events and exhibitions. Upon that framework, the VR Chelsea will enable creative practices in visual and performing arts, and deepen dimensions of presence for remote users. This platform can also be used to explore solo standalone storytelling experiences that dive into the lives, times, and secrets its walls hold with immersive embodied narratives that tap into spatial memory.
Toward Utopia: Experiment by Design
The Chelsea Hotel as a venue presents a spatio-temporal canvas from which thousands of stories can be spun. Since its construction in 1882, founded in the vision of philosopher Charles Fourier’s utopian phalanestary, the Chelsea has been home to over a century of iconic artists, poets, writers, musicians, performers, and composers, and has been legendary as a cultural touchstone throughout its existence. The Chelsea legacy has leapt far past 23rd st, even beyond the bounds of time & space, into its own digital twin built inside Second Life. Constructed in 2009 in response to the sale of the building to a real estate development company, this virtual replica within the Linden metaverse houses its own community of creatives, who regularly gather for open mics, performances, and art exhibitions. I’m fascinated by this process of translation, from physical space to virtual place, and how spatial memory can be preserved to cultivate new forms in networked virtual afterlives. Chelsea Architect Philip Hubert’s bohemian fantasy only quietly endures in SL, but this 3D fossil is a living archive infinitely more authentic to the Chelsea spirit than the now renovated dystopian husk on w23rd st..
Entry in VR
Alive&Well is a social VR venue that pushes beyond the Chelsea’s Second Life into a third dimension of presence for embodied interaction and immersive narrative experiences.
In this project I have been exploring
Virtual Chronotopes, collapsing configurations of space and time to bring flesh to spatial memory
Space vs Place, how design and artifacts collectively construct symbolic ecologies to evoke authentic experience
Chelsea ethnographies, conducting fieldwork and interviews of communities past and present in both physical and virtual spaces
Reimagining Utopia, cultivating virtual space in the image of progressive socialist ideals at heart of its legacy
Puzzle Adventure Gaming, necromancing a set of mechanics for narrative storytelling from early PC gaming
Diegetic Creativity, curating a space where users can draw from the inspiration of the environment, culture, and history, and find new expression
Expanded Cinema, advancing new dimensions of presence and embodiment for spatial and object based storytelling and immersive experience design.
