Personal Project | Summer 2015
Partner: Xiyao Wang
Museum as Spatial Translation of a Film’s Narrative
This project investigates the linguistic nature of space to tell a story. It exploits the interactivity of space to expand the narrative into the reciprocity between the narrator and the viewer, and challenges it with open readings.
A museum is proposed based on the film The Sun Also Rises by Wen Jiang. The Sun Also Rises unfolds with a non-linear narrative encompassing four sub-stories weaved between multiple characters. The director plays with misplaced timelines, tangling events, and illusions of tcausality. The film montages the story into a myth. Taking a structuralist point of view, this project embarks on a pure spatial abstraction of the movie’s narrative structure rather than its specific plots. The movie’s key scenes and narrative structure are translated into four spatial prototypes and two lines upon which the museum is developed. Visitors flicker between participants and spectators, thereby interpret the story through their own lenses.
Diagramming Narrative Structure
Each plot abstraction is translated into a spatial prototype, and developed into a twofold:
The lower part is an IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENT in which visitors play the roles of the movie character. Overwhelmed by immediate perceptions, they experience the story arranged by the NARRATIVE LINE. The upper part provides a review of the scenes from a PRIVILEGED VIEW. This time they become distanced observers while other visitors lingering in the lower part become their subjects. Plots follow the TIMELINE to clarify the events.
Spatial Prototype
Spatial Transposition
Scenes
Redirection & Paragraphing
The Chamber of Redirection is where visitors’ routes are re-coordinated to the sequence of the Timeline.
Bridges reach out of the chamber into the main exhibition sessions, cutting the scenes through, forming mezzanine-like observation points. The observation areas also serve a “paragraphing” function in the museum’s spatial syntax. They separate scenes to create a sense of articulation and prepares passing visitors for the transition ahead.
Chamber of Redirection
Spatial Units & Geometry
Units Model
Assembled Model
Dual Experience: Time vs. Narrative
Visitors experience the museum twice. During the first tour, as directed by the Narrative Line, visitors take the roles of movie characters, bringing themselves into the plots and lost in the intense narrative. Upon finishing the first tour, they are led to the second tour as per the Timeline to review the story. This time they gain a privileged view of the circumstances they were set in moments ago, with other visitors still in their first tour putting up the "play". The dual experience facilitates a dialogue between "actors" and "spectators", allowing visitors to construct their own story.
Sections