House of Eternal Return
I’ll never forget my first visit. It was New Year’s Eve a few years ago, and the moment above—where I was transported into a neon aquatic forest—is seared into my brain. I experienced a wonder, a complete surrender to a suspension of disbelief that I constantly chase when going to immersive activations.
“This is what we call the accessible unknown… a threshold for people to walk through and something they understand in this reality that helps kind of frame what the experience is as you move into the unknown,” Garner explained, referring to Meow Wolf’s varying entry points. It could be a refrigerator door or fireplace, “because unknown is scary. We as experience designers, immersive makers tend to have a little more tolerance for the unknown. In general, it is scary for us to move into unknown spaces, so [we’re] helping people ease into the mystery by giving them something that they’re familiar with. So in this case, it’s a house. And then in this story, you come in and you find out that the frame of the house holds the story of a family that accidentally broke open time and space when they’re trying to bring their son back from the dead. So it’s actually a pretty, like, dark story that gives some emotional resonance there. And when their experiment backfires, their house explodes from the familiar and the safe into the unknown.”
