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Designing for Emotional Presence: THE ALTAR

BRENDA MARTINEZ

2 DECEMBER 2022

Across the experiential landscape, terms borrowed from religious studies and spirituality often pop up as explanatory terms, such as the phrase brand rituals. For us at New Moon, this tendency is indicative of a cultural truth—for an experience, branded and otherwise, to be resonant, it should include elements of the sacred.

 

In our recently-published white paper, Experience 2.0, we identified nine distinctive tenets of emotional presence, tenets that make an experience emotive and transcendent. Of these, several touch on the religious to define elements that go into designing a memorable experience. One of those tenets is The Altar.

As defined in our report, the altar of any experience is a visual anchor, with its own physical and emotional gravitas. It’s a singular point of heightened focus and a site of reciprocity, where guests offer their energy and attention in exchange for exhilaration, escape, and awe. The altar comes in many forms across experiences: it could be a stage, a runway, even a DJ booth.

For Telfar’s 2020 presentation at Pitti Uomo, the altar came in the form of a banquet table. As part of the famed designer’s show at the biannual menswear trade show in Florence, a circular banquet table was constructed within the throne room of the Palazzo Corsini. Thirty feet wide and adorned with fruits, focaccia, and flaming candles, the table was the visual and spatial focal point of the experience, starting first as the site of a raucous dinner. Guests, which included artists Solange, Kelela, and Juliana Huxtable, enjoyed experimental dishes from NYC-based Spiral Theory Test Kitchen. The meal recalled Gordon Matta-Clark’s Bone Meal (1971) as well as the Rothschild Surrealist Ball (1972)—that is, it had a distinctive air of performance art, vibrating with creative energy that included musicians spontaneously bursting into song using microphones nestled amongst flora & food, and performers dancing atop the table as guests ate.

The following evening, the table became a runway, with models strutting over the dinner’s detritus in Telfar’s stunningly constructed and deconstructed designs, a performance that also paid homage to Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party installation. The dinner and the runway effectively turned the banquet table into a dynamic, living monument to design, style, and the creative energy imbued in every Telfar piece. The result was a vibrant, pulsing altar that facilitated creative exchange between art, artists, musicians, and friends.

The tenet of The Altar is also something we had in mind when we were tapped to design the launch of TAG Heuer’s latest smart offering, the Connected watch. For the launch, the altar came in the form of a metallic carousel, indicative of the circular nature of time and featuring disparate materials that showcased the watch’s design elements. Sumptuously sculptural and placed in the center of the sprawling Caldwell Factory in New York City, the carousel featured metallic tubing, resulting in a gleaming display of shifting lines and movement. As the majority of the space was lit by atmospheric, dim lighting, the carousel also provided a distinctive source of light, with displays illuminated from above, as if from a celestial source, and lights at the base providing a visual anchor. Guests were encouraged to step into the carousel, where rounded metal plinths held lightboxes of raw materials like titanium, juxtaposed with the finished Connected pieces, further cementing the visual and practical expression of the watch as a bridge of duality between preparation and action.

The launch experience overall was dynamic and multi-layered, starting as an international daytime media launch and transitioning into an evening keynote speech that doubled as the premiere of a cinematic brand film. At the experience’s every iteration, the carousel at the center of the experience commanded attention and focus, drawing the eyes of every guest and featuring in the majority of both produced and organic content.

Our full white paper, available for download here, delves into the other eight tenets of emotional presence, including another religiously-tinged tenet, Sacred Space. If you’d like to schedule a presentation of Experience 2.0 for yourself and your team, reach out and touch base.

With Love,

New Moon