Heaven or Hell

Conceived and submitted in early 2020 for the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, before COVID-19 was characterized as a global pandemic, Heaven or Hell was never produced. The description below is the original proposal, written in the conditional it has always occupied.

As proposed, the work would turn personalization into an ordeal and a revelation. Inside a translucent chamber, a visitor would enter a feedback system composed of projected image, architectural light, spatialized sound and physiological sensing.

It would begin in relative neutrality. The room would establish a baseline and then introduce a changing sequence of colour, movement, brightness, contrast, rhythm, sound, pitch, volume, spatial pressure and, where available, scent, while the adaptive system observed how the visitor’s breathing, pulse and other available signals varied in relation to those stimuli.

It would apply no fixed definition of fear or tranquillity, developing an individual map instead. A colour that settles one person may activate another. A low frequency may feel protective to one body and threatening to the next. Silence, saturation, darkness, repetition, proximity and speed would acquire meaning through the visitor’s own response.

Hell would not be a universal image of fear, and Heaven not a predetermined image of calm. Each would be generated from the sensitivities of the individual body.

From that map, the room would compose two personalized realities. Hell would come first, drawing on the visual, sonic and spatial conditions associated with greater activation in that particular visitor: the architecture appearing to contract, images growing denser, rhythm accumulating, sound moving closer to the body — not a religious destination but an individually generated environment of pressure and heightened response.

The system would then pass through a neutral threshold and construct Heaven, selecting the colours, movements, frequencies, tempos and spatial conditions associated with settling and release. The room would appear to open, sound would lengthen, and visual fields would become slower, softer and more expansive.

Heaven and Hell would therefore not be opposing pre-recorded films but temporary perceptual worlds composed from the same visitor’s physiology. The work asks whether a responsive environment could reveal sensitivities that consciousness does not ordinarily recognize — and what it would mean when technology can address the body at that level. In 2026 it was digitally visualized to communicate that proposition.