Book 1 "Room" Project

                  In the novel "Room" by Emma Donoghue the rising action of the novel and a constantly referenced and important aspect of the story takes place in the aptly named Room. Now Room itself is just that, it is an actual single cell room containing all the amenities of a typical house, restroom, kitchen, and bedroom, all within the same cramped space. The catch to Room is that the only door to the outside is remotely locked, nobody comes in, or goes out without the explicit permission of Room's owner. A middle aged kidnapper named Nick. Now while fans of the novel can read the book and attain a feeling of what it would be like to exist in Room like Jack, the five year old protagonist of the story who narrates the novel in his immature and innocent voice. The absolute weight of the novel is made almost less so by the decision to give the reigns to Jack to narrate. The childish take on everything in Room and the fact that he was both born and raised in it, and he cannot fully grasp the concept of a world outside of Room, the reader looses some of the severity from this colourful narrator choice. So as a fan-experience, something to really aid in striking the nail home, we propose the "Room Experience."

                The "Room Experience" itself will sate the mind's misunderstanding about what Room itself is like. The experience would entail a scaled larger model of Room, so that an average 5' 5'' adult would be able to view the setting of Room from the perspective of Jack, who during the story is 5 years old. During the time in the scaled Room participants will be able to view various micro-settings from the novel. For instance, Jack is forced to spend some of his nightly hours in a large standing wardrobe (named Wardrobe by Jack) avoiding the gaze of Nick as he comes to check on Jack's mother who was the original prisoner and occupant of Room. Wardrobe plays a part in the story as it is Jack's world within his world but also as a character that Jack must interact with, during the fan-experience participants would be able to view Wardrobe as it was depicted in the story, but at their scale as to allow the severity and weight of the character's plight to truly set in.

              In addition to Wardrobe, all pseudo-characters inside Room will be recreated to match the scale. Items like Lamp who is responsible for the sole light-source in Room and Skylight will be replicated to match the time of Room's events, being coated in snow and dampening the light in Room. Excepts from the novel will be scattered about in places where certain events took place and will be used to add emphasis on concepts like the fact that Jack and his Mother were given so little by Nick that to entertain Jack his Mother had to fashion a toy 'snake' out of scrapped eggshell halves and string, dubbed Eggshell-Snake the gravity of such a toy is to degrees lost in translation between the event in the book and Jack's narration.

          The "Room Experience" is made not to broaden the audience of the book directly but to aid in the understanding and severity of the book's setting, to very clearly set in stone the desolation that the characters were forced into for the opening act of the story, and to gain a sort of new-found clarity to what Room actually is. A portion of the crafting done in "Room" is made purposefully vague, so that reader have to scramble to try and understand the often confusing and unintelligible words of a five year-old who is trying to get the story out the best he can but finds unintentional pitfalls in narration due to his age and lack of understanding. The vagueness of "Room" in describing Room itself can be seen as a strong suit by those that analyze the story, but can just as easily create frustration in readers who enjoy understanding the full width of their stories. The "Room Experience" is for those readers, those who want the nail struck home and to add another layer of depth to their interaction with the novel they've put their waking hours into reading.

What is a book?

A book is an amalgam of words that form sentences and therefore full ideas and concepts that interact together to create a logical flow of narrative intended to be read by someone other that just the writer. What a book is not is a physical thing, words themselves and the media to read a book are in fact terrestrial but the book itself and the story those words form are something almost extradimenional. The way books came into being was like the birth of other arts, it was established loosely with a common theme. That every book were words printed on paper and sold in large sets of pages bound together. But just like the other artful media we have created the book has slowly began to adapt and to leave it's previous restrictions, the binding of pages was merely a means to an end and is now just a suggestion of how to convey the books story. If we look at the music industry, a media form that actually evolved in tandem with the book for the longest time giving a new form for verse to take, where as most all prose remained between it's bindings, verse became music, and music occupies so many forms and has evolved to strive as apposed to survive. The vinyl record made music you couldn't make yourself portable, then the 8-Track tape and the CD improved on those ideas and made music such a beautiful success, likewise when we discovered a way to change prose into a new art form. That of movies and plays and television, they all started as a book renamed a script and as time passed we stopped having to use colossal reels of film to play movies, they turned into video-tapes and then DVDs and now Blu-rays and digital distribution just as it's cousin music did. But the book, the old forefather of all our art media is still trapped by the old-world construct it began as, the book is now dying because humans have attached too much to the physicality of the book's bindings, an author who relies on the concept of a book having weight, of smelling a certain way to convey the idea that yes you are in fact reading a book, have failed at their jobs. Writing itself has evolved to fit the new media the book is trying to occupy, authors are writing more descriptively and with  more passion because they have in a way transcended the mortal plane, they have become like their great-grandchildren arts by becoming digital.  The sad interaction of some authors to stop this transcendence into the next phase of life for the book are the noose around it's metaphorical neck, most all authors that make the comment that the physical body of their book is an aspect vital to it's feeling were born before the age of the Internet and digital media. They didn't grow up with a world that is always shifting in the field of arts, where nothing is set in stone anymore and where they would actually have more freedom. They too, like the book grew up bound by an old-world construct. The idea that a book must be pages between bindings and that it must go through a publishing house and the concept of royalties and not being paid the majority for their work, has crippled the minds of yesteryear's authors, and their mindsets are passing down the shackles as they die out. Digital Media is the key to the lock on the book's prison, but so many are too enticed by the nostalgia too let go. That is something that needs to change for the book to not just survive but thrive in the new-world, children need to be brought up learning too read and enjoy a book for it's content not its medium, less the book itself will rot away with the paper-backing it was forged into.