Keiichi Tanammi was born into WW2 Japan. His childhood involved witnessing hundreds of firebombing attacks on his city, Tokyo. The memories and images he witnessed in his childhood later became major motifs in his art and designs.

A few main images Tanaami brings from his childhood and into his art today include: American bomber planes, flares dropped from planes, and flashes of the bombs reflecting on his grandfather’s deformed goldfish in its tank.

The team drew inspiration from this
as we found Tanaami’s interpretation
of the dark memories in his life to be unique. Tannami’s arts and designs are created through bright colors and whimsicalness but the artifacts he uses in his art depicts the trauma he experienced as a young boy.

Our narrative of a simulated LSD experience was inspired by our want to promote a journey for the museum visitor that would provoke self reflection and upbringing of trauma. We wanted the museum visitor to leave the experience having explored many avenues and perspectives to approach the dark memories in their lives.

Entrance Room (Pre-LSD Trip)

Hallway (Stage 1: Anxiousness)

Keiichi Room (Stage 2: Curiosity)

Squishy Room (Stage 3: Intense Emotions)

Exploration Room (Stage 4: Peak)

Mist Waterfall (Stage 5: Loss of Sense of Self)

Garden Room (Stage 5: Loss of Sense of Self)

Reflection Room (Stage 6: Intense Emotions)

During the Pre-LSD trip stage, it is crucial to educate the visitors on what LSD is. This is the entrance room or the lobby where the very first experience will happen once the visitors walk into the museum. Since this is the preparation phase, visitors will be educated on LSD itself in order to set their expectations on the experience they are about to go through.

This entrance room is the first scene visitors will see once they walk into the museum. On the left is the name of our artist, Keiichi Tanaami, and the title of the exhibition “Mind Trip” along with decorations. The wall facing straight up includes a short paragraph about LSD trip and visualization of different stages during the trip in order to educate the visitors on what the drug is about. It will also be a good indicator on what the visitors will experience in the museum and keep them thinking about expectations going into the experience.

Stage 1 of the LSD trip arouses the feeling of anxiousness as the dose is starting to stimulate and set the zone to start the trip. The Hallway that connects the Entrance Room to the next section of the museum is used as an imagery of Keiichi’s early childhood trauma of World War 2 devestation, bombing, airplanes, and its aftermath of distroyed family homes. The Hallway is an elongated black and white, grayscale room with Keiichi’s early paintings of the history of the war. Black and white environment setting represents the depressing moments of Tanaami’s early trauma which grounds the visitor at the beginning in their known reality, and the elongated room draws the visitors to want to escape from this part of the space as if they are escaping from their trauma. The unbalanced and unstructured layout of the paintings on the walls express the first phase of LSD trip when people feel generally anxious.

The first section of the exhibit is the hallway, which features imagery from WWII in Japan. As the visitor walks down the hallway, the images and furniture become more scattered and distorted. Our goal with this area is to convey some of the traumatic experiences Keiichi Tanaami went through during his childhood, and to show how his distorted memories of this time informed his later work.

Stage 2 begins to introduce new sensory elements and challenges the initial expectations of the visitor. At this stage of the LSD trip, people will start noticing distortion of the environment along with intense emotions and feelings. With an underlying sense of anxiety, their curiosity will increase as they start noticing changes in visuals and small details they previously weren’t able to see. The purpose of this stage is to draw a direct line between Keiichi’s past trauma and future work by having a more traditional gallery of work sit in between the Hallway and the highly sensory and disorienting Squishy Room.

The second room is filled with Tanaami’s most colorful art pieces along with colorful lighting. Inviting the colors to the environment expresses his intent of escapism from the war and his past traumatic experiences through bright colors.

TouchPoint

Our first touchpoint is within this space. Visitors can pick up AR glasses off the wall to see the paintings and environment seemingly come to life. The sketch shows a goldfish from Keiichi’s painting swimming around the exhibit, with little animations to find that supports the attention to small details stage of the trip. This touchpoint is intended to be used independently. Based on the museum concept evaluation, being able to remove yourself from that experience is very important to creating a safe environment for people to experience this immersion at their own comfortability level.

This room acts as a transition between the come up of an LSD trip and the peak. The room has textured walls which primes the museum visitor for the next room which will be the peak. We want to introduce the user to a change of environment in that they will be completely immersed in a new reality at the end of the room.

This room transitions to stage 3 of the trip. People will walk through this hallway and are invited to reach out their hands to experience textured walls, bright colors, and distant sounds from the next room in anticipation as they move closer to the peak of the experience.

In the peak of the experience, visitors can expect heavy distortion of their environment, alongside the changes in sensory experiences present in Stage 3. The peak of an LSD trip can often be accompanied by some sort of realization or change in perspective. To simulate this, the exploration room is intentionally designed to allow for free-form exploration of the various touch points available.

The goal is to get lost in the experiences in the room and find yourself forgetting about the world outside of the room. Various types of visual stimulus, including imagery of goldfish, war, and Keiichi’s animations are presented. As you walk along the goldfish aquarium section, the ground becomes squishy and visually ripples as if you are walking on water. The sounds in this space will include movement of water, echoes, and fast-paced and exciting music.

This room shows stage 3 and 4 of the trip, the exploration room. Depicted in the sketch are a variety of micro interactions, exhibits and touchpoints for the museum visitor to explore.

Touchpoint

Our next touchpoint is scattered throughout the Exploration Room and is Talk Tubes. In reference to Keiichi’s art depicting themes from his childhood, these are devices styled like the Talk Tubes you find on the playground in which visitors engage in unexpected conversations with strangers in a different part of this room. Their voice will become distorted on the other side of the conversation.

The transition space between the peak of the exhibit is met with a mist wall that has flowing water projected onto it. This is used to mark the change in space and introduce visitors to the garden. The fast-passed noises from the exploration room begin to fade and are replaced with a distant sound of nature.

Picture above is a visualization of the transition space into the garden room.

Stage 5 of the LSD trip will start alleviating the intense emotions and distorted reality the visitor just experiences and will lead them to a loss of sense of self, slowly starting to come back to reality. We call this room the “breathing room” because we intended to give the feeling that the trees and nature are breathing, hoping to promote a sense of synchronization with nature and meditation. Additionally, nature-like background music will be playing along with sounds of birds to make the experience more engaging. We emphasized the surrealness and peacefulness for this room particularly in order to let the visitors genuinely enjoy themselves in the moment and start reflecting on the museum experience they just went through.

Pictured above and below is the “loss of sense of self” phase of an LSD trip. This includes a garden filled with sculptures of Keiichi Tannami’s work. We also have artifacts in the garden room that are abnormally sized, which adds to the simulated LSD experience.

Moving towards the last room of the museum, there will be a private section with several computers with a reflection prompt related to personal traumas for the visitors to privately and anonymously answer if they feel comfortable. This last touchpoint will transition and prime the visitors to the last stage 6 of the LSD trip, reflection. During this stage, we wanted their personal insights to arise, bring their trauma to the surface and feel a deep sense of acceptance as they exit the museum experience.

Touchpoint

Pictured above is the interface of our third and final touchpoint. This touchpoint is the largest as the response a museum visitor inputs in the field will be displayed on the screen wall in the next room (bottom right). We wanted the visitors to internally interact and create a sense of community and unity through sharing their moments and creating an art piece together.

This interaction point is to finalize this idea of unspoken unity within the group of visitors. After they transition into this last section, they are able to sit and reflect on the collaborative aspect of creating a piece representing their combined trauma together, similar to how Keiichi Tanaami represented his own traumas.