The House Of Eternal Return
This Thursday, March 17, is a Big Day: Meow Wolf opens its newest interactive experience in Santa Fe, NM. The experience is called The…
This Thursday, March 17, is a Big Day: Meow Wolf opens its newest interactive experience in Santa Fe, NM. The experience is called The House Of Eternal Return. The name suggests that you will want to keep coming back to it. It’s kind of like a video game that you enter physically.
Just like a video game, the play mechanic is designed to give you reason to want to come back after you leave. But, unlike a video game, this is a built environment housed inside a former bowling alley. When you enter the space, the first thing you encounter is… the front porch of a house, the House of Eternal Return. Enter the house and wander through the living room and kitchen and bedrooms, and you’ll discover that a family lives in the house. You’ll eventually figure out that, in order to understand the story of the family, you have to explore. You explore by going through portals: there’s one in the refrigerator, another in the fireplace. I won’t even try to tell you what you find on the other side of these portals, except that they are not more houses. It’s the closest thing I’ve experienced to entering a fantasy world, at least since I went to DisneyWorld when I was a kid.
The House of Eternal Return is an actual house, here while it was still being built.
This is physical, real world experience designed to let you explore it, interact with it, and be consumed by it — like a video game, but where you are the avatar. The play mechanic is all about figuring out the story behind the family. As in a video game, you can start and stop and leave and return.
What the heck do you call this thing? The phrase “interactive experience” is what most people use, but it doesn’t actually do the project justice. I haven’t actually been through the experience yet, even though I’ve had two hard hat tours, because it isn’t an experience until it opens, which is this Thursday. I’m headed down to Santa Fe to be part of the opening. (This is not a hardship, since I’ve owned a house there for nearly 15 years.) But I’ve bought the vision hook, line and sinker. I’ve invested personally in the company, Meow Wolf, that conceived of the project. I’ve tried to get my friends to invest in it. And I’m helping the founders, lead by a young fellow named Vince Kadlubek, in any other way I can.
Meow Wolf is a remarkable thing to happen in a small town in one of the poorest states in the U.S. This article from The Guardian does a really good job of describing how the project evolved, but if focuses too much on the celebrity backer, George R.R. Martin, who has lived in Santa Fe since 1979. The remarkable thing is that a group of artists and creators (now often called makers!) came together in that small town and were able to use their hands, brains, and modern tools to create a built environment that could be the first instance of the next generation Disneyland: Except these are smaller, less expensive to build and therefore can be built anywhere in the world and be truly local experiences, instead of major tourist destinations that take billions of dollars to build and require millions of visitors to be economically viable.
Santa Fe is already known as a remarkable place for its environment, its artists, its food, its culture. And now it is the scene of a cutting-edge creative development that could change how people entertain themselves in their home towns!