Plex

2010 • Directed by

Van McElwee

Movie theaters are temples that have morphed into labyrinths, architectural fractals leading from the actual to the virtual. These multiplexes steer a diverse public through branching hallways to imaginary worlds, where the labyrinth shatters into glowing handheld screens. Designed as a movie for phones, PLEX is an architectural model of an endless cinema, made from a set of twenty black cube interiors filled with colored screens and artificial lobby music. A spiraling camera path connects the cube units into a free-form structure that occasionally loops back on itself, creating intersections of cascading screens. An external view would reveal a chain of cubes endlessly exploring a 3D grid of possibilities. The cubes play like wind chimes, blown by chance.