The concept for The Fascination came from my dreams. I can’t stop dreaming about cruise ships. I’m inspired by the strange scale of them: they are at once huge and city-like, but everything in them is the wrong scale: miniature restaurants, bars the size of a closet. I wanted my sculpture to capture this - almost 7ft tall, towering bigger than most players, but containing rooms in 1/12th scale.
The Fascination is a digital sculpture game, in miniature, that engages with our perception of control and belonging in a witnessed narrative. A miniature scale building is backed with monitors upon which digital scenes are performed. Players peer inside the dream-like dwelling to watch scenes go by within.
Both animations and circuitry are activated with sensors as players look in different spaces of the sculpture. This gives the work the feeling of a true but scaled space - one that the player can see and comprehend in its entirety, but one that by its very nature, a player is not welcome in - they could never fit inside.
This project is an exploration of the concept of miniature space, as outlined in Steven Millhauser’s essay “The Fascination of the Miniature.” In this essay, he notes that the most compelling part of seeing a miniature is that the scale of the miniature, as opposed to the gigantic, is comforting. The miniature gives us a sense of control, that we can posses and see the truth all at once. It pulls us in with comfort but inevitably reminds us that we do not belong in this safe world, for we are too big.
The universe is too large for us. Death is too large for us. Death hums in every stone. The great walls soar, the windows are too high. But suddenly the walls descend, the windows are little spaces we kneel to peer through. [...] The miniature, then, is an attempt to reproduce the universe in a graspable form. It represents a desire to possess the world more completely, to banish the unknown and the unseen. We are teased out of the world of terror and death, and under the enchantment of the miniature we are invited to become God. (Steven Millhauser, “The Fascination of the Miniature”)
Miniatures are voyeurism. To look into a dollhouse is to peer into a space that is not your own. Isn’t voyeurism the fascination of a space that you are not a part of? The lack of responsibility but the pleasure of drama? No, it is more, or we would be fascinated with reality TV. True voyeurism, a lucky glance into an apartment window at night as you walk home, is more special. Secret. Taboo. Just for you. The Fascination is a gift of voyeurism to the player.
