This past week, I visited my old college roommate in Albuquerque and went on a road trip to Santa Fe to check out Meow Wolf, which is home to something called ‘The House of Eternal Return.’ The building contains a full-sized family house, complete with a living room, porch, kitchen, and bedrooms, but scattered around the house are books, planners, and pamphlets that give clues about the residents, including Lucius Fox, who is the founder of a Scientology-like cult called Positive Mechanics, which is concerned with travelling through dimensions. It’s essentially Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but built to scale, with a refrigerator that leads…somewhere else.
While wandering around the house, I found some interesting in-world texts, including a will, a PowerPoint presentation on a computer about Positive Mechanics, and a cipher for an unknown language, which allows you to decode a nearby message in a picture frame. Most interesting of all was a tapestry titled the ‘Technomancer Manifesto,’ which can be heard spoken aloud here.
Here are some of the pictures:
The House of Eternal Return is hands-down the coolest place I’ve ever visited, and not just because it’s a funhouse filled with occult B.S. It’s the kind of weird, incredibly ambitious project that you always hear people talk about as some ultimate goal, but inevitably never gets off the ground due to practicality. But Meow Wolf and the HOER is not only real, it exceeds all expectations and all goddamn definition. It really is a playground for the imagination, and mixes dark storytelling with mind-bending experiences and the sheer joy of exploring–anyone who’s been there knows the stuff I’ve described is only one-tenth of the experience. It makes me happy that a place like HOER exists, and it inspires me to do something just as weird and ambitious.
You can check out the website here.