La Porte


La Porte: door, gate, doorway, gateway, hatch. ‘The door’, to go through the state and beyond. 

The 'doorway effect' is a psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another. We tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary, forget what we were thinking about or planning on doing.

Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at literal boundaries (e.g., moving through a door into a different room) and metaphorical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway). 

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So, I created 'La Porte'. A swinging silver space style saloon door sculpture in the middle of a grassy field at a PAPAGO festival. It doesn't physically lead to anywhere, but simply by creating a door, it creates two different spaces, the space from which one came, and the space into which one entered.

Simply by stepping through the door, people experience a state change, a change in space and state of being. I wanted to experiment with this, to see if people would forget, switch their mood or state of mind. 



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