The Portal Galleries 2022

The Table, carpet & The Portal Galleries Act.II Immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Space Popular: The Portal Galleries is a study of the magical portal found in mainstream media. The Portal Galleries archive is composed of over 900 portals found in fantasy and fiction books, films, graphic novels, and games covering the last 150 years. in 2022 the study led to the definition of 18 portal archetypes and conclusions presented in a solo exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London between June 29th and September 25th, 2022.

Type: Installation / Research / Immersive Film

Exhibited:

2022 June 29th – 2022 September 25th

Sir John Soane Museum, London United Kingdom

Solo Show: The Portal Galleries

Erin McKellar

2023 May 10th - 2023 September 10th

MAK Museum of Applied Arts. Vienna. Austria

Group Show: /IMAGINE: A Journey into The New Virtual

Curators: Bika Rebek & Marlies Wirth

Team: Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg

Research assistant: Joy Evelyn Wilson. Illustrator: Rachel Swetnam. Asset Artist: Deborah Wong

Photographer: Gareth Gardner & Matthew Blunderfield

Fabricator: Constructive & Co

Creative Partner: Alcantara

Selected Press

The Guardian / Oliver Wainwright

RIBAj / Pamela Buxton

FRAME Magazine / Lauren Grace Morris

Stir World / Zohra Khan

V&A Magazine / Rachel Potts

Azure Magazine / Drew Zeiba

Related Work

The Portal Galleries 2023 at MAK Vienna

Table and Immersive Film

At the centre of the gallery at Sir John Soane Museum stands stands a table, covered in Alcantara®, which maps Space Popular’s study of portals in fiction and their development throughout time. Surface details highlight significant examples of portals in media such as books, films and video games, indicating when they appeared and their defining features. The portals are arranged according to a series of types suggested by the research. Each centimetre represents one year, starting from the 1950s, which saw an explosion of interest in the idea of the portal and the transit it enables, and moving towards the 2020s.

The Table, carpet & The Portal Galleries Act.II Immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London

Photographer: Gareth Gardner

The Table at the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

The desire to travel virtually across time, space and realms has been a recurring theme in the collective imagination – one that many have explored through fictional narratives. As a result, portals are a recurring device in mainstream media: we read about them in books, see them on the screen, and even traverse them in games. These magical thresholds defy the laws of physics and can instantly send a person across time, space, or even other dimensions.

Portals are door-like or hole-like thresholds that grant us entrance into another virtual environment of any kind and size. As digital media gains a third dimension and becomes immersive, the way in which we swap between spaces will have to be designed. Portals are one of the most popular means to switch from one environment to another and they will likely become the go-to reference for virtual travel. The Portal Galleries is an archive and exhibition that aims to compile a history of what we argue will be the key architectural element of the coming decades. Between 2020 and 2022 we compiled an archive of portals in fiction which has over 900 entries. The analysis of the archive has already led to initial conclusions and remains an open resource for study.

The exhibition Space Popular: The Portal Galleries at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London (June 29th - September 25th 2022) presented the archive of portals in response to ther virtuality of Soane’s work, bridging the technologies of his time and ours. Unfolding walls, cleverly placed mirrors, and scale shifts are just some of the numerous examples of portals at Sir John Soane’s Museum, making it one of the greatest collections of pre-electronic media teleportation devices.

The exhibition consists of several parts presenting a cross-media historical study of fictional portals: two immersive films with accompanying furniture pieces that enable a multi-sensory experience, a 2D film presenting the 18 portal archetypes found in the archive, analytical drawings of portals in Sir John Soane’s Museum, and a curated series of drawings from Soane’s office representing a diversity of thresholds.

Space Popular’s research has resulted in a database of more than 1,000 fictional portals. These are classified according to their attributes, and are shown here as a series of types.

Some are categorised by the type of travel – across time, space, or dimensions, others by the portal's creation – through technology, magic, or nature; the way in which it is used; how it can be initialised; and who has permission to use it. Many portals enable forms of exclusivity, such as the wall at Platform 9¾ in the Harry Potter books.

The database also contains details about size, appearance and length of journey, and data about works in which they appear, such as genre, media or place of origin.

Space Popular. The Portal Galleries

The Table, carpet & The Portal Galleries Act.II Immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London.. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

The Portal Galleries Act.I Immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

The Portal Galleries Act.I Immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London.

Photographer: Gareth Gardner

Space Popular. The Portal Galleries.

And Immersive Film in Two acts.

The Exhbition Space Popular. The Portal Galleries at Sir John Soane Museum in London 2022 centers around an immersive film in two acts. Visitors could experience the two acts of the film through two separate HTC Vive Pro virtual reality headsets.

Still from Act.I of the immersive film

Still from Act.II of the immersive film

The Table and immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Stool specifically design for the exhbition at Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

A parapet designed for assisted viewing of Act.I of the immersive film at the Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Interview with the artists Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg at Sir John Soane Museum in London. Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Space Popular. The Portal Galleries

Portal Archetypes, 2022

Digital prints

This drawing, shows Space Popular's list of portal types – a project which is still in progress. It aims to create a frame of reference for the virtual travel infrastructure currently under construction in the immersive internet (AKA the metaverse).

Research assistant: Joy Evelyn Wilson

Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Portal Studies, 2022

These images show Soane Museum spaces; the Breakfast Room (bottom left) as seen from within the shallow dome, and one of the mirrors in the central threshold of the Library-Dining Room (bottom Right). Both of these are fantasy views which highlight the potential of these architectural elements to act as portals. If we were to step inside them, these are the views that we would get looking back into the Museum.

The top left image depicts the view of the Picture Room that a visitor would have when looking back from within one of the many worlds contained in its famous unfolding wall displays. This drawing offers a fantasy view not possible in the Soane Museum itself.

The top right drawing depicts the passage from the South Drawing Room to the exhibition galleries you are now standing in. Visitors passing through this space exit Soane’s world and are transported back into our own.

Researcher & Illustrator: Rachel Swetnam

Viewing Portals.

Objects from the museum collection selected by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg for the Exhbition.

These two cases offer pairs of complementary Soane and Space Popular images which seek to analyse the spatial characteristics of portals themselves. The Soane office drawings have been constructed to offer ideal views of existing portals in buildings that Soane designed: the Museum and the House of Lords. Space Popular’s images analyse four existing portals in the Soane Museum, in many cases positioning the viewer inside the portal looking outward. This type of analysis contributes to a discussion of the mechanics of portals, and the way we can perceive spaces once inside them.

Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Portal to Infinite Space.

Objects from the museum collection selected by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg for the Exhbition.

Each drawing shown here deals with the concept of infinite space by depicting repeated openings and overlapping windows. These openings and windows are portals which aim to take people to other places. The idea of infinite space is reflected in the idea of the immersive internet, commonly known as the metaverse, which is an internet-based network of worlds. In the immersive internet, travel between spaces and worlds already requires the use of portals and will increasingly do so. Thee infinite spaces depicted in these drawings foreshadow what might exist in the future.

Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

Light Effects

Objects from the museum collection selected by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg for the Exhbition.

All four of the drawings in this case show an interest in defining space using light. They speak to Soane and Gandy’s fascination with achieving different sensations and visual e􀇺fects as a person passes from one space to another. In each image we see an arch that acts as a portal, drawing the viewer towards space behind it. Light highlights these spaces beyond. The repeated use of the arch leads us to think about the forms that virtual portals might take.

Photographer: Matthew Blunderfield

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