Photo Credit: Terry Podgorski

It is bright here in LA. And the streets and sidewalks are harsh. I am standing on a corner, at a bus stop, steps from yet another fantastic taco truck. It’s a perfect place for a spell of vertigo.

 The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, Los Angeles.

Reality and dreams dance in a mesmerizing exhibition. Photo taken illicitly by Terry Podgorski.

 The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles is subtle. One might say shy or well disguised, able to stand on the street corner and pass as “normal” in the light of day, at least in comparison to its Chelsea cousin, Sleep No More (read my review here). The Museum is another type of dream in which you are not quite sure if you are dreaming but you’re pretty damn sure you are dreaming because it all feels just a bit off but yet it’s just as normal as standing in your kitchen with a cup of coffee in hand except, now that you think of it, it’s not your kitchen but your grandmother’s kitchen, and she’s been gone for some time, and it’s all in a green palette that she would have never used and she’s talking to you and telling you it’s time to get to school. It’s definitely a dream.

But you’re struck by the cup. It’s such a normal cup. White. Heavy. With a graceful loop for your finger. It fits in the palm assuredly. Maybe it is real after all.

There is no kitchen in the Museum or white archetype of a coffee cup, but there is a bona fide fissure in understanding. And you are asked to stare at it.

You’re always staring at something intently at the museum. Peering at diagrams and dioramas and dialectic arguments. Sometimes, it’s through a microscope at the carving of a golfer on a needle. Sometimes, a hazy piece of glass hiding the x-ray of a lily. Or a spyglass with an owl inside perched on a branch. The mission seems plain enough. You’re being asked to look at the world, and find the truth in it, but regardless how hard you try it is not there. Unless the truth is; there isn’t any.

You must understand that at this museum something else is on display besides history or fact. The inspiration for the exhibits comes from the wild possibilities of the world and humans. It’s that thing that artists through the centuries have tried to touch, describe, put on a pedestal and reveal.

Actually, imagination is on exhibit here. Or is that wonder? Perhaps it’s possibility we are looking at. Can we tell the difference?

What is real and what is on display? That’s the crack in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.  In Sleep No More the crack is a story broken into pieces and scattered across a hotel. In each, reality and expectations are broken, a portal opened, a world reveled, and a promise made.

Photo Credit Stephanie Diani for the New York Times. Pictures the “Wundertrailer” in the Garden of Eden exhibit.

Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.

It’s the promise of walking dreams while awake, of escape, of breaking the confines of what people tell you reality is.

Smash the mirror. Or step through it like Alice.

Portals and the Other Worlds in Between

Now, we’re going there. “There” being the “great beyond”. We’ve talked spaces. Real brick and mortar buildings in Seattle. (Read about our search here). We’ve talked places. Inspirational attractions from East Coast (here) to West (here). We’ve talked games. Cracking puzzles that change the narrative. Now, let’s talk alternate realities.

“Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.”

There are portals. They come in many forms. There are natural ones like harbors and caves and ones made by human hands like an arch or a tunnel. They can be unlocked and free to access or guarded and require a passport. Portals can charge a toll. That toll can be paid in money or in something more personal. They can be uplifting, transformational, and the means to a new beginning, but they can also be cloaked in shadows and marked with regret. These portals signify that something has gone forever.

 Artists have managed to open portals.  Once inside you become enveloped in another standard of rules and even though the outside world remains, just within the flip book of thoughts, “I need to call my mother”, “where did I leave that card”, “I need bananas for breakfast tomorrow”. The familiar fades and another sense of direction takes over. Then, we know we are somewhere else- an alternate reality.

Twice, lately, I’ve experienced this vertigo. The first...

Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman

Sleep No More. Chelsea, NYC.

I’m wandering an abandoned asylum on the 4th floor of The McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea, New York. The floor is complete with a turn of the century operating room, a collection of bloody bathtubs, and a maze of birch trees. I am standing in a small office flipping through a log book of patients looking for a clue to what happened in this place. I decide it’s time to leave and descend the stairs. But my path is blocked. A nurse in her white uniform with red piping ascends the stairs with a small crowd of masked ghosts following behind her. I stop, stand aside to let the gang pass, and do a 180 to join at the back. We crowd into the receptionist’s office where a cloud of loose pages hugs the ceiling like a cloud trying to escape. The nurse takes a seat at the desk. She opens the log book I had been pawing only a minute before, pauses over a name, makes a notation or two, and looks up with a red-lipped grin acknowledging us for only an instant as if we are only notions before closing the book, returning it the desk drawer, and heading on from the office to eventually meet another nurse in the maze of trees. They begin a silent argument of indignations and petulant gestures that turn into a dance until the nurse I followed from the office pirouettes to leave only to collapse backwards into the arms of the others and drapes to the ground. All the while we, the audience, hover on the edges staring through the branches, silenced.

Photo Credit: Yaniv Schulman

We, the audience, wander The McKittrick Hotel, the site of Sleep No More, in our white masks that turn each of us into a voyeuristic ghost in search of a story. They tell us it’s “Macbeth through a Hitchcock lens” whatever that is, though I guess in some way we do know what it is and like it. We believe we know the story of betrayal and murder and ultimate hubris, and we know that “something wicked this way comes” as we wander the halls, but we do not know what portion of the story we will stumble upon at one moment or when we may be implicated. We pass from one diorama to another searching for meaning, a clue to which way to wander, a direction from a performer or a written note that clearly tells what is happening, but we look in vain. We stand amongst dried herbs and moldering taxidermy, read case files and stare at photos of murder scenes looking for the thread of a story, feeling it press down all around, whispering in our ear, “I promise you’ll get it next time.”

And this is one type of Alternate Reality. A Liminal Space. Bold and dark and dripping with passion.

The second spell of vertigo is yet to come. Stay tuned…

Imagine a crack.

A carefully scratched jagged line in polished stone.

A peeled and stained curl in a formica desktop.

A crumbling split in dusty concrete at your feet.

For some people cracks cause anxiety. They are a blemish. Something to be filled and corrected. But for others they can be expressive, even artistic. A person might put gold foil in them to highlight their very nature and embrace the broken, transforming a flaw into an attraction.

Kintsugi Pottery

But a crack is a glimpse. It is not a full fissure. For that we need something else. A portal.

Imagine a blue door. Bright, luminescent, almost neon when you were near them, because of course they sense you and respond. They never touch the ground. They hover 16” in the air in the darkness between two houses, stuck in the shadows, glowing blue but never illuminating anything around them. The light is internal, drawing you in like a blue blackhole. It is obviously a portal. Why not go through? How could you refuse?

You find yourself in a gap of Liminal Space. You are in between. Liminal Spaces can be physical (like a doorway), emotional (like a divorce), or metaphorical (like a decision). This portal happens to be all three.

This can be unsettling for some people. They may feel a sense of disorientation or a loss of sense of place, as these spaces lack clear markers of identity or ownership.

 These are the cracks in the Layers, the Doors we pass through in life, the ones recorded in the Book of Findings visible through the Spyglass, and tread by Those Who Left. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves and for another time in the future. You don’t need to concern yourself with that right now.

All you need to know is that Portals lead to Liminal Spaces, and that is where Wonder hides, and Wonder is the seed of Imagination.

The beginning bar area at The Doors of Divergence. Image Credit Escape the Roomers.

Escape Room Field Report - East Coast

Location: New York City. Williamsburg, Brooklyn to be precise.

Events: Doors of Divergence

1)    Heresy 1897

2)    Madness 1917

Environmental conditions: Hot. Hot. Hot. Hazy with Canadian smoke. Pride Weekend in NYC brings a celebration of thongs.

Summary:

We do two narrative heavy escape rooms produced by Doors of Divergence. Escape rooms started out as simple puzzle rooms with a theme, short on the story with a ton of padlocks. But the genre has grown, so more and more have turned up the performative elements to create a world. The Ministry of Peculiarities has been doing this for some time. Doors of Divergence are new to scene (opening in 2022) and the word on the street is that they are full of characters and story. Also, the two rooms can operate as individual experiences, but they are parts of single narrative, and choices made in the first segment, Heresy 1897, will affect the situation in the second segment, Madness 1917. In this way, a patron can return and make different choices solving one of the issues with escape rooms, “repeatability” or the return customer.

In both experiences, you start off in a bar. Everything should start off in a bar. The bar patrons are used to seeing strangers pass through from one timeline to another, and they give you the lay of the land before you enter the timeline that awaits you.  

Stepping into Heresy 1897, heavy on Symbology. Photography is discouraged, this image is credit to Escape The Roomers.

1)    On the first adventure, Heresy 1897, we go in as a duo without a team hoping we meet some quality folks. And we do, but only 2, so there are only 4 of us to tackle this escape room. We could have used more.

The experience is dense in puzzles. There are twists and turns and tiny details to be noticed to move forward. This is when a larger team comes in handy. Our guide, a masked figure belonging to the Order of the Three Keys lays on a thick narrative and works hard to keep us moving along on the right track, but there is a lot to do here. We learn the symbology of gods, explore Egyptian maps, deduce life altering experiments, decode the carvings on an ancient obelisk, all leading up to an encounter with a demon yearning to enter our world and wreak some sort of havoc. And in that moment, you are given a choice…

Yes, we respect the rules. But rules are made to be broken. Personal info redacted during Madness 1917. Photo by Terry Podgorski.

2)    The next day we return for part 2. We only have 1 other person joining us so we persuaded the 2 lovelies from the first adventure to join us for the second portion. And they do. Thank goodness, because we needed them.

In segment two, Madness 1917, we enter Holy Grove Sanitarium catering to those shell shocked by the events of World War 1 which was probably instigated by the demon we helped in the previous story. But no worries, there’s always a chance at redemption. Here, we meet a doctor and nurse new to the job. After a brief introduction we are given a tour where to our surprise we end up in two adjoining cells, admitted to the asylum, the group split, but able to communicate.

Over the next hour we work as a team to discover who inhabited these cells before us, play with spooky dolls that correspond with local, macabre murders, deduce that the doctor wants to lobotomize us, deduce that the nurse is not who she seems to be, steal a key that leads to our escape, and once again a member of the team comes face to face with the demon and is given a choice…

Conclusions:

What we learned from our choices in these two segments: We like to help rampaging demons cross over to this world. We don’t know why. We’re not even sure we knew we were doing it when we did, but the choice of eternal life seemed just too damn tempting. So maybe we learned something about ourselves.

We also learned that some rooms are tough nuts to crack. In the first segment, we looked over some obvious clues, but again that’s what a large group is for in these trying times. 2, 3, or 4 people cannot see or do everything.

In both segments, the sets are well drawn populated with ancient maps, carved figurines, tubes of scientific goo, and a monolith with glowing runes needing to be activated. The props and puzzles fit well within the story. The dollhouse and doll situation, truly creepy. In the second segment (Madness 1917), the need to communicate between two cells turned up the excitement, and we required less help in general because it was more intuitive. The presence of the two actors playing the nurse and the doctor provides for more banter and easier storytelling. On the first adventure, I began to feel a bit sorry for the poor actor who had to prod us through the Heresy 1897 story. But in Madness 1917, the narrative flowed smoothly.

Recommendation:

It’s for those who like to escape more than they like immersive performance. We read that Doors of Divergence was heavy on the narrative, which they were, but we expected more in the way of performance and less in the way of escape room. That is not the case. These games are not for novices. Though again, the actors are helpful and no player will be locked away for life and called a loser. We survived. Everyone survives. In the end, it is fun.

The worlds are very well defined: the first a dungeon with hidden Egyptian secrets for eternal life, the second an asylum of murderers controlled by a demon. The puzzles and the tech high quality. Be prepared.

The East Coast tour to Doors of Divergence concludes our Field Reports from the Summer of 2023. We’ve been off investigating other suspects, but these belong to a different category of experiences, those of an Alternate Reality! Stay tuned…

Apologies, but another illicit puzzle photo of Madness 1917. Beginners, beware. Photo by Terry Podgorski.

Interior at Lab Rat taken by Terry Podgorski

Escape Room Field Report - West Coast

We’ve been on a wander to discover what is going on out there in the world of entertainment in 2023. We’ve hit up theme parks, immersive museums, conference, and escape rooms.

 To be clear, Nordo is NOT opening an escape room. But, escape rooms are increasingly more narrative and theater is increasingly more interactive and somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot that will sweep audiences off their feet and into a suspension of disbelief and wonder. This is the spot we are looking for

So, for your perusal, a top secret Field Report.

Location(s):

1)Seattle, WA

2)Los Angeles, CA

Event(s):

1)   Locurio’s “Storykeeper”

2)   Hatch Escapes “Labrat”

Environmental Conditions: spring to summer delight. Almost bordering on too warm for these Northwest souls. Visit the La Brea Tar Pits everyone! They’re so cool. LA is weird.

Seattle Summary:

 1)   We put together a team of nerds and competitive game nuts and met for dinner and a couple of drinks in Fremont at the Red Star Taco Bar. We then headed out to find Locurio. The business hides in a sneaky apartment complex in central Fremont. Down an alley. Through a gate. Up the stairs. The first part is a success. We feel pretty good. A bit edgy

“Storykeeper” is rooted in fables of old. One of these stories has been absconded and must be returned and fixed! We begin in a library with shelves of tales, traverse a magical forest full of creatures and mazes, and end in a hut with a particular disgruntled creature that might seem familiar once you’re there.

We struggled at first. It took us awhile as a group to get our puzzle brain on, but once we did we made good progress with minimal hints. The last couple of puzzles nearly got us, but with an “aha” moment here and a bit of luck there, we put the components together and turned the crank to “solve” the room with a whole 3 minutes to spare.

The world of fables was back to how it should be!

 L.A. Summary:

2)   Flying in for the Next Stage Immersive Conference we only had a few friends to hit up for our team in Los Angeles. Though our team was small, it was mighty. We met in a neighborhood that I’m sure has a name, but to me, who has only been to L.A. once or twice, seems to be between many neighborhoods, but then again most of L.A. seems that way. Labrat is in a tall, older warehouse that used to house copies of all the Screen Actors Guild scripts ever written. Truly. Every script submitted to SAG had a copy in this building. I think that’s hilarious.

 You’re a human. Duh. In a cage. Oh no. With real bars. Giant rats in lab coats are experimenting on your team to judge the extent of human intelligence if there is any at all. The rats (really actors on screen in rat garb so don’t worry) are a bit rude and demeaning, but then again you would be too if you had been test subjects for centuries and the tables flipped.

We passed through a series of tests based upon true lab experiments, win the treats, conquer the giant water bottle puzzle, stumble at charades a bit (I am terrified of charades and nearly froze), then spin the hamster wheel in the correct pattern to prove our intelligence and win our freedom!

Humans do have intelligence! Even the rats have to agree!

The unassuming entrance to the Hatch underworld, where LABRAT is contained. Photo by Terry Podgorski.

Conclusions:

 1)   It’s amazing what Locurio has done in the confines of the space they have. The worlds are clear and delightful. Because it’s based on common fables you feel like you should know what to do, and in a way you kind of do if you could only see it, but surprises abound. The puzzles are a masterful blend of styles and everyone in the group found a way to contribute and win the day!

2)   Labrat is hilarious. Cute. A riot. The event is full of “aha” group moments. I’d love a video to take home of our team in the throes of delight chasing a ball rolling through a track system suspended from the ceiling. The story is also clear and complete, and the puzzles flow from one to the other in the context of the “experimentation”. “Inventive” is the word!

Recommendations:

1)   Visit and support Locurio now. It’s in Seattle. So close to downtown. Plus, based on a reliable source we know that Locurio is also looking for a new home to expand their brand of narrative escape rooms. Rooted in literature with a wicked eye for good puzzles, we’re sure the new venue will be a success.

2)   If you like this kind of thing and are in L.A. hit up Labrat. It’s a laugh. But also, keep an eye on Hatch Escapes, the parent company. In their building they also house “The Nest”, immersive narrative designed by a couple of Imagineers for only two guests at a time in which you explore the life of person through what is left in storage.  And, they have a couple of promising new rooms on the horizon including “The Ladder”, a corporate espionage piece with multiple characters and multiple endings that we are eager to see. The tour we were given of the almost finished rooms blew our little tech minds. They’re on the edge of new things.

That concludes Field Report #1. Stay tuned…

Our intrepid L.A. team of “Lab Rats”. Photo by Terry Podgorski.

The site of the NEXT Summit, the Herald Examiner Building in downtown Los Angeles

What do Disneyland, Meow Wolf, League of Legends, and Nordo have in common?

It’s Saturday June 3rd in beautiful Downtown LA. 9 a.m. We arrive bleary-eyed looking for the free coffee. We sit. 250 attendees and 50 speakers have congregated in one room. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you.

Mission:         Figure out what the heck this immersive movement is and who is a part of it.

Top Secret Mission:    All evidence points to Nordo fitting into Immersive Universe, but how exactly? And what new elements can guide Nordo’s development into that “next big thing”?

Where:            Los Angeles, California at the Next Stage Summit by the Immersive Experience Institute. Held at the beautiful Herald Examiner Building where Arizona State University has opened a new, technologically advanced center for design and the arts, this conference dedicated to all things Immersive was 4 years in the making because of COVID interruptions. The organizers breathed a huge sigh of relief to open their doors to the hundreds of guests from all over the world.

The Content:   Over the course of 2 days there are 10 time slots for presentations. There are individual speakers and panels convened on specific topics.  At any given time, there are up to 3 options to choose from and attend. A total of 50 presenters! There were talks on producing, writing, marketing, virtual reality, gaming, costuming, one-on-one performances, audience development, the list goes on. Intense. An overload really.

Image Credit: Katheryn Yu

Here are a few examples of those people that I either had a direct connection with or who touched me with their talks… 

·     Wendy McCellan Anderson who started in the theaters of NYC (like our own Erin Brindley!) before directing 115 performers on the Disneyland Starcruiser Project and now acts as lead storyteller for Riot Games ensuring all the narratives live in one consistent world.  

·     Writer Margaret Kerrison who spent 6 years with scripting the narrative for Disneyland Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars Project and wrote a book on immersive storytelling. Extremely helpful to hear tips from a seasoned agent working on some of the largest projects in immersive.

·     Nonny de la Peña presented on her astounding Virtual Reality career that has spanned decades and has been showcased around the world. She did the first VR exhibition at Sundance for example in 2012. Her focus: bring a spotlight on the injustices of hunger, immigration, and incarceration using VR. She’s the real deal using tech to bring about societal change.

·     Terry Pettigrew-Rolapp and Tommy Wallach, the founders of Hatch Escapes and The Ministry of Peculiarities (I am so envious of that name) shared ideas on how to move the genre of escape rooms forward into something more narrative and not just a collection of puzzles.

·     Joanna Garner, Senior Story Creative Director for Meow Wolf, spoke on becoming our better selves through art and how “reality” is co-created when artists and audiences interact in space. Some of you may remember Joanna authored a piece that happened at Nordo in 2017, “Please Open Your Mouth”.

A production shot from Please Open Your Mouth at the Culinarium in 2017, photo credit: Ryan Warner

There were numerous others. Here is the list of speakers if you’re interested.

 The Puzzle:      Here, amongst all these talented creators are clues to the answers to our Top Secret Mission. They’re here just screaming to be found. You see, Nordo will be a mix of the disciplines gathered at this conference. But the exact recipe is alluding us. How will we continue to tell stories? How will we capture the interest of our future audiences? This is why Erin and I attended this Summit

So, what actually happened?

After a couple of days of escape rooms, the Le Brea Tar Pits, the Museum of Jurassic Technology (see most important side note below) we arrive on Saturday morning , and it begins. And… where do we start? How about, immersive is undefinable and always will be, so stop trying! That’s not the question to be asking! The question we should be asking is: how is immersive valuable?

We dove right in.

Let me clarify - immersive is undefined. And likely, always will be. The term encompasses too much. It’s a new term for ideas both old and new. A zeitgeist. And why is that? Well, because it is offering something that people need. It has commercial and social value. And after many talks, and many opinions, the general consensus is that the new word scratches that very old itch for storytelling. Humans love storytelling. Immersive is a new approach to storytelling.

Transformation is at the heart of it. The immersive arts create fully functional fictional worlds that engage and transform the perceptions of the participants. And transformation is the beating heart of storytelling. The heart beats, and creates storytelling.

In a nutshell, immersive is themed entertainment. Or more broadly perhaps, themed engagement.

(Not everyone in the immersive world is attempting to entertain, some educate. The aforementioned, Nonny de la Peña’s work blew my mind and is remarkably educational, and does not care to be or need to be entertaining.)

And whether you are a solo performer engaging a single audience member journeying through self-exploration (like Spencer Milone Williams or Whisperlodge) or engaging millions of tourists with a mega popular intellectual property like Star Wars the goals are the same- to capture a person’s attention and take them on a journey. And the processes of design are the same regardless of scale.

All of these fields: museums, theaters, theme parks, video games, escape rooms, etc., realize that they are all trying to do the same thing with the same mechanics just using slightly different terms. But the big umbrella over it all is Immersive.

And, before the word immersive was common place, Nordo was doing just that with a fictionalized chef and restaurant in the warehouse of Theo Chocolate in Fremont back in 2009. And Nordo will continue to do that because that is art.

Annastasia Workman in The Cabinet of Curiosities, Washington Hall. Photo Credit: Bruce Clayton Tom

Conclusion:      Overall, the conference was spectacular. A success. Honestly, it was a marathon of introductions to new people and ideas which spun me through heights of inspiration, “This is so damn cool I can’t wait to get to work”, and lows of intimidation, “How the hell could I ever do something as beautiful as that?”

The people that attended it ran the gamut of skills from producer to writer to technician to performer. Some have done all of those things at one point in their careers, some  all at the same time. Some were new to the field and others were pioneers. Some were just beginning and others have held high level positions as Imagineers at Disney. The talent at the conference was .

Attendees may have recognized one another, may have worked with one another, but before the conference they did not recognize one another as a community. But at this conference a community was realized. There was a fluency of language. And Nordo speaks this language. Whether we are producing site-specific works like we did from 2009 to 2015 or building an institution like we did from 2015 to 2022 we speak this language. And as we transition we will continue to speak this language. Nordo is themed, it engages, and it is transformative.

The Question for the Future:What alchemy of these elements of narrative, installation art, performance, game mechanics and technology will be brewed together to create the next flavor of Nordo? You’ll have to wait and see, but, it’s brewing.

Most Important Side Note:    Also, I must say I visited a place that I have worshipped from afar for over 20 years ever since I read the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders by Lawrence Weschler. The book singlehandedly changed my mind on how to approach creating art. And the world really. The place is called The Museum of Jurassic Technology. And stepping from the bright concrete sidewalks of LA and into the dark, musty corridors of the museum I crossed a threshold and lost an entire afternoon perusing the mind bending exhibits

It’s an American art institution. It is truly a museum, a place to stand in the presence of the muses, “a place where a person can stand aloof from every day affairs”, a place where we experience “the incongruity born of the overzealous spirit in the face of unfathomable phenomena”. Their words not mine.

You have to give yourself over to it and let it tell its story. It’s a novel weaving of fiction and non-fiction seamlessly before your very eyes. It’s an alternate reality (What is alternate reality? Oh, this we will delve into more in an upcoming entry!)

The Museum of Jurassic Technology entrance…until next time.