GAMER'S PARADISE
LOCATION
MALMÖ, SWEDEN
STATUS
COMPLETED
YEAR
2003
SIZE
920 m2
PROGRAM
EXTREME GAMING EXPERIENCE
PHOTO
ÅKE E:SON LINDMAN
Here, you feel the pulse of the future, of endless possibilities. The future awaits you by the gigantic glass door. The highly illuminated tunnel is a gate and a time machine that connects two worlds, a voyage to the future. You arrive at an airport with abandoned strange machines that take you on a virtual trip. Virtual convenes with future. Here, notions of the future are created without high-tech elements, but instead, a well-defined, powerful space. The interior is fantasy inciting and slightly uncanny. The space is like in a computer game, where you are either running from something or chasing someone. Gamer’s Paradise is a space that you move through to find your spot, your machine knowing where other people are but you don’t see them. Players almost hide behind their computer screens in their own virtual world. The screening is like a “film noir” with references to futuristic pictures like L.A. in Blade Runner or the subway station in Matrix Reloaded. It stimulates feelings of the new generation with temptation of entering the unknown and to let the spontaneous and unexpected meetings lead the way and affect the future. Air, space, freedom and infinity, are all strong elements that are used to penetrate the virtual space.
A spatial sequence takes you from a narrow, rhythmical tunnel through the reception with a massive iron and concrete reception desk, stainless steel automates that looks like coming from the factory in the picture Metropolis. The long connection hall provides you with the information needed to find the way to your gate, your computer. Finally, you get to the black landing area with 120 computers waiting to take off.
Focus is on contrasts at all levels. An effective light setting emphasising the contrasts, plays between dark and bright, grey and colourful. Contrasts are between cold and warm materials, soft and hard, claustrophobic and airy, virtual and real. Like in Blade Runner, Gamer’s Paradise is a utopia, a mixture between past and future at the same time. You may even sense an acid rain outside and a constant darkness in a city inhabited by unknown individuals that disappear into a computer game.