The Imaginary Hotel An interactive Installation linked to the Internet.

Gallery visitors are invited to make up their own room. Internet users are invited to take part online at www.azapp.de/hotel.

The Imaginary Hotel allows visitors to occupy and design their ideal room and fill it with personal content and inspiration. It consists of a public installation at a gallery space or exhibition linked to an interactive website. The installation architecture resembles a typical hotel room; yet choosing image and video footage from the net via the room TV menu, can alter the standard interior and even hotel location. At the same time internet participants can interfere by modifying or uploading further material via the hotel website. They are also able to ring up the gallery visitors via a specially designed web-telephone interface, which turns text into voice and vice versa. A web cam is streaming real time video from the hotel to the website to document the ongoing changes.

A hotel as such stands for an anonymous social melting pot in a constant state of flux ? The Imaginary Hotel further mirrors digital travel in a distorted concept of space and time. It represents a virtual retreat accommodating permanently migrating residents. Similar to a blank canvas, the vacant room is successively populated and shaped by individuals. Real and virtual guests arrive, meet and disappear from out of nowhere and leave their personal traces, reflecting the seamless border between physical and imaginative places of being.