Amusement parks tend to orchestrate visitors' spatial orientation, literal or metaphorical: physical, cultural, social, historical etc.
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What soon becomes apparent to the uninitiated patron of AstroWorld is that the map more often impedes than facilitates one's ability to move through the park. In effect, one might con-
clude that the park encourages the patron to move in an ambient fashion through its space, to develop individual "interpretations" of the space through the act of wandering attentively yet leisurely.
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Some coasters offer the promise of free-form movement, liberated from the spatial and temporal constraints which the patron experiences not only on the park's ground level,
but also as a rule in the structure of everyday life.
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Another way in which roller coasters organize spatial and temporal dimensions as distinct from the context of ground-level space is by structuring the riding experience as a narrative, as a series of anticipations, climaxes, and resolutions.
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the contemporary theme park is a "hybrid" space, one defined by the accumulation
and reconfiguration of seemingly disparate features which have attracted patrons to various versions of the amusement park since its inception at the beginning of the century. It is also a postmodern space, sampling fantasy structures and reclaiming history in a way that often challenges and disorients the patron who attempts any motivated movement through it.
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The roller coaster, this hybrid's most distinctive attraction, offers a diverse set of unfamiliar,
exaggerated, and impractical interpretations of time and space which might be described as ultimately still more disorienting ... coaster euphoria is certainly a celebration of instantaneity; yet this celebration depends on a temporal and spatial contextualization
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Coasters offer intricate narrative structures whose pleasures can only be derived through spatial performance, through participation in the activity of rendering spatial and temporal dimensions coherent. Ultimately, by incorporating disorientation as a crucial element in a drama of orientation, the roller-coaster phenomenon provides a means of challenging
postmodern theoretical assumptions regarding the cultural context of euphoric pleasure.
"Orchestrated (Dis)orientation: Roller Coasters, Theme Parks, and Postmodernism"
by Michael DeAngelis
Cultural Critique, No. 37. (Autumn, 1997), pp. 107-129.
Press one button and there's a distinct chill in the bedroom. Press another and weird vibrations set hairs on end in the study. And over by the fireplace in the dimly lit living room, amid the flickering shadows, you catch fleeting images out of the corner of your eye. Was it a child, an old hag, or...just the light playing tricks?
The machines in Antal Lakner’s INERS Passive Working Devices series transform seemingly meaningful human activity—the individual phases of repetitional production processes—into meaningless physical exertion, leisure activity and entertainment, whilst immaterialising work itself. The idea of buying a wall-painting workout machine and turning work into sport by painting a non-existent wall, sawing, or pushing a make-believe wheelbarrow is, of course, no more absurd than being the proud owner of an indoor bike or a rowing bench. However, the question arises just what exactly we are working on (or out) when sweating away on these reality-replacing, virtual machines? Obviously ourselves. The reason why we give ourselves up to the early-1960s creation of post-modern technological civilisation, the cult of physical fitness, is to reclaim everything that our bodies—lazy and alienated by over-consumption—have lost as a result of technological development and industrialisation.
Kinesthesia is your sense of motion derived from the movement of your muscles and skeleton coupled with your sense of balance from your inner ear. Virtogo Inc. motion platforms are designed to enhance kinesthesia with a 6DOF capability constructed with the same mechanical architecture used in aerospace and military simulators. The pneumatic actuation of our motion platform creates a different kind of feel from electric and hydraulic platforms.
"Disastrous tourism" in the Chernobyl nuclear plant site is compelling example demostrating amusing "trivialization" (or marginalization) of threat or disaster. Probably each disaster somehow gives birth to new types of amusement or alternative pleasures. Following the 9/11 incidet many emergency survival kits were produced, some of them are being used more as equipment for amusement rather than for survival (for instance emergency parachute, designed for bailing out of window of multistorey building, is being used by extreme parachutists; or iraqian children fishing by detonating grenades in a lake).
Coney Island of the mind: the rides in Carsten Höller’s “Amusement Park” at Mass MoCA can be seen and heard but not used.
