01/22/2025
I am trying to keep myself entertained as the weather gets colder, something I am putting valiant effort into this year. It’s really fucked up that I can’t just go on a little walk. Like it actually feels punishing. But I’ll play the cabin fever game with rooms that aren’t actually real. “Real” being subjective, for the purpose of this post. Maybe they are just “intangible,” but I don’t know, I can still touch all the walls.
One I visit a lot is just white walls. There’s a door that leads to what I can only assume is a hallway full of other rooms just like this one. I come in here with some paper and a bucket of glue, and I start rolling the paper onto the walls with thick layers of glue and my roller. I think they are just direct printouts from Genius.com, but they contain lyrics to songs I am determined to get stuck in my head. There’s not a speaker in this room but the songs and albums are blasting as I work along. I paste another copy of Sig Alert onto the wall as the part with alarms sound… “Sig Alert… Sig Alert… and it sounds alarming… got it… Sig Alert… Sig Alert… makes sense…” I step on a big glob of glue on the ground with my work boots. Shoot. I can kind of hear the buzzing of artificial lighting in here but it’s not harsh, just sterile. It takes concentration to let an album like this seep into your brain the right way, so often I take a special one like this to extremes. I need to feel it coated behind my eyes so that I can conjure it at a moment’s notice. Especially when winter leaves everyone feeling like this. I am making a conscious effort to combine these words and sounds in my head. I am making a conscious effort to visit this room often. I am making a conscious effort to internalize its meaning.
Another one I visit often is created out of curiosity, rather than steadfast commitment. There’s a version of it that really exists somewhere, but this is more of my prediction of it. I have no idea if I’ll even see a picture of it, let alone see it in person. So there’s guesswork to be done. First, it’s location is all wrong, not only because of the street intersection, but because it is literally floating over Park Avenue (not the one in New York). I only know this because when I look out the window, I look down to see the cars pass underneath, like this room is on a bridge. I don’t really even know how or why I conceptualized this angle in the first place when I have never floated above Park Avenue. Especially facing the wrong direction. But, it’s also all wrong because the shape and architecture of the room is incongruent with the time and style the houses in this city are built in. It’s got tall ceilings with rounded corners with white, detailed molding across the doorways. There’s even a quite ornate, but modest chandelier. These elements do not belong, as well as that floating feeling, and this is how I am utterly aware this room is nothing but a romantic fantasy. I am taken back into a reality when I look at the more grounding elements, like the messy bookcase (What possible system are these organized in? Surely not alphabetical, nor by genre. Why do you have a 2013 Farmer’s Almanac? And why is it next to this dilapidated middle school copy of a Mark Twain novel? The crinkled photo of your friend is cute but the lonesome contact lens next to it is actually gonna make me crazy). And a dresser that never fully closes -- because of that I’ve tripped over the same t-shirt every time I come in here. Your bed surprised me at first, the frame is like hickory, and the carved detailing on the headboard and knobs are peculiar. It feels like a heritage item passed down to you. It’s creaky, but comfortable. And I never expect the blanket that goes on someone’s bed -- but this is more of a universal feeling, I go to a lot of people’s houses and think to myself “THAT is the throw blanket you’ve chosen for your bed? I’m not being judgemental, it just seems… diagonal to the duvet, as well as other aesthetic choices you’ve committed to in this room. It’s a pretty blanket, just surprising, that’s all.” So I know that the blanket I originally imagine, in the preconceived notion of this room that is already a preconceived notion, is softly woven and blue, and is not present. So in the room right now, it’s a red and black plaid pattern, and fairly coarse. And I understand that my little mind cannot actually fathom the blanket present in the real world. But, I come in here when I feel curious, or want to make assumptions. I pick things off the shelves to inspect and lightly move around clothes on the floor with my foot. You often just stand there watching me, or you fall asleep and I’m looking out the window, wondering if I should leave or not. I probably should. I don’t really have much business here other than curiosity. I’d really quite like to have other business in this bedroom but I fear that I am really missing the mark with this one. My bad, dude. One can only hope for a case of the wrong time & place.
A room that super doesn’t exist, not even in my not-existing realm of rooms, is one that's mostly empty and has no discernable walls. It has a small, uncomfortable blue couch, one that can only fit me, and that’s it. I refuse to enter this room because the second that couch starts to be big enough for the two of us to sit on, I need to take a bulldozer to it. Sorry, Stan. Hope can be an unfortunately dangerous thing.
My favorite room that doesn’t exist is one I can only hope will exist in the future. There’s a giant drawing of it in my studio. I like catching people staring at it and trying to understand the incoherent notes and arrows. Some people are surprised when I point out the intended perspective. I think about it all the time. I draw it all the time. It’s become a simple notation for me, and a symbol of projection. It’s a long, dark hallway, you enter from the south side of the museum and must leave all belongings outside the door. You must enter alone. The hallway leads down to a wall with light and sound. There is no echo as you walk down this hallway, but there is a feeling of lifting anticipation as the ceiling slopes upward, until it breaks off into a tower right in front of the wall with light. There is a cascade of speakers, layered up this tower. Looking up, you can see the spiral and hum of them in unison. I don’t know what sounds are coming out. Sometimes its words, sometimes my voice, and other times gentle tones or random sounds of the world. But they are layered by bass and volume, the loudest and bassiest speakers are at the top of the tower, and the quietest ones are at the bottom, closest and most intimate to the viewer. There is a focal point to stand in the middle of the room to hear how they are arranged perfectly. Now, the light on the wall is orange. It’s orange because I think that may secretly be my favorite color. It comes up constantly in the things I love most. I am easily allured by orange. And I don’t know if it’s concave or complex, but it has some sort of physical presence in the room. I think it shifts in hue occasionally, and it’s hard to tell if it’s just your eyes from looking for so long. You are supposed to stand in this room and go somewhere else. It is the perfect conditions for travelling. I don’t know what this means. I’ve been trying to figure it out for a long time now. You are supposed to go somewhere else; Not that you don’t belong here, or you are unhappy, just that in the brief moments that it happens, it feels more complete than ever. You can’t get there in a car or on a plane, and I don’t know where “there” is. But it feels really important to get there. And it’s not about feeling high or altered, you can’t get the same effect through substances, it’s not about that. Travelling to the place that doesn’t exist feels so unfathomable to explain. It’s fleeting for a reason. The second you figure it out is the second it slips away. And it truly slips away -- it goes somewhere else. Until you fix your radar, and it blips on the map again. Then your map disintegrates. Now, when you are in this room, I suppose the whole time you could be leaving and going somewhere else, imagining some other fake room you wish you were in. But the main focal point of the room, when you look up at this big, circular orange light, is the real connection of leaving. And of course, this being an ideal perfect room, the angle at which you tilt your head back is accounted for, with speakers at that height and canted to the angle of your ear canal are producing the perfect sound (it’s spinning). When the light reaches your eyes, and the sound reaches your ears, that connection is what sparks the jump. And you stand there for as long as you like. This room is built as a tool, to give the viewer a lifelong connection to the There, to have access to visit the There when they want to. It’s a necessary place, which is why it takes so much effort to reach. The There is a place of solitude as well, which adds to its level of unexplainable-ness (AKA, it’s unshareable-ness), and why you cannot stay forever. It’s not heaven, it’s not perfect and it’s not the end goal, you can’t spend forever there. You can only try to incrementally lengthen the time spent there, before you come back. This room gives me that leverage.
You have many impossible rooms you visit, I’m sure. If you are spending too much time in real rooms (in and out of your head), I recommend the fastest way to visit one of these fantasy rooms is by going to a museum and staring at a piece of art for 45 minutes. Last time I went to the museum they removed three of my favorite pieces, which left me sad, but interested in the unexplored architecture of some different rooms.
Post-Script: Recently, after writing this, I was introduced to Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. It is unbelievably stunning, and more shocking, almost exactly what I was envisioning. I swear I’ve never seen it before. But I still aim to make my the There room one day, maybe now it just becomes more of an homage.