A virtual house designed for the student’s avatar, attached to each’s existing house or apartment building.
This studio’s inspiration came largely from Satoshi Kon’s psychedelic film Paprika; where a psychiatrist heroine (Chiba) uses a device to treat patients and interfere in their dreams as the character Paprika. When the device is hacked, characters’ dreams invade their waking reality in a spectacular strangeness. The underlying, fiercely philosophical concepts of the film are borrowed and developed, to inform the design of the students’ virtual house – the relationship between human morality and imagination – personal identity – heterogeneity and duality – ubiquitous surveillance – time-space compression – the liminality and fluidity between places and states of being…
The challenge was in the interpretation of these concepts formally into a small-scale house, for their personal avatar to dwell in (however they are imagined) and in drawing, representing their ideas as they are meant to be discovered through the work.
Students started by surveying and presenting a set of drawings analyzing their own house, then a precedent house from a selection of case-study houses they were presented with. These analyses were used to accumulate concepts that would compose together with the selected theme from the film and the imagined avatar’s needs, a well-rounded, multi-faceted surreal house.