Portal
Description
We stay connected to the people we love through the material world—favorite foods, meaningful objects, special places, and shared activities. When someone is no longer with us, we create rituals to keep their memory alive.
Portal invites visitors to contribute hand drawings depicting material connection—objects, places, meals, or activities linking them to someone significant.
With consent, these drawings are integrated into a digital environment created by artist Rel Pham using AI tools and projected within an immersive installation space.
Each contribution enters a negotiation between the drawer's intention, the artist's digital curation, and AI's hallucinatory interpretations. This iterative process integrates an unstable context of changing site constraints and events in real time.
Portal functions as infrastructure: a system receiving inputs, processing them through layered interpretations, and outputting an accumulated imagined landscape. Like our city itself, the installation emerges from the interplay between systematic logic and improvised gesture.
Biography
Our collaborative team bridges Hong Kong and Melbourne, bringing together architects, designers, researchers, and artists.
Vicky Lam is an educator at RMIT Architecture with experience in Melbourne, San Francisco, and New York. A Harvard GSD graduate, her work focuses on inclusive cultural production and civic infrastructure.
Melbourne-based artist Rel Pham, whose work has been exhibited at the Melbourne Triennale 2023. Known for vibrant colours and surreal explorations, Pham draws on old world fables to explore the interconnected nature of our physical and digital realities through video, animation, and installation.
Silje Howard, an architect and exhibition designer at M+, has delivered major exhibitions including works by Yasumasa Morimura and Robert Rauschenberg.
Lauren Garner is an architect and researcher who founded G-AP, a practice engaging with complex public projects, heritage frameworks, and civic outcomes.
Oscar Jacobs and Oscar Chaplin are emerging designers completing their Master of Architecture at RMIT. Together, this collaboration investigates the relationship between built and digital environments, exploring how contemporary urban life is shaped by material and immaterial systems.
Materials
Paper
Cloth curtain
Mesh curtain
Velcro
Metal curtain rail
Projector
Organisation
RMIT University, School of Architecture & Urban Design
Sponsor
RMIT University, School of Architecture & Urban Design
Acknowledgments
RMIT University, School of Architecture & Urban Design