The Imaginary Hotel allows visitors to occupy and design their ideal room and fill it with personal content and inspiration. The installation architecture resembles a typical hotel room; yet choosing image and video and footage from the net via the room TV menu, can alter the standard interior and even hotel location. At the same time internet participants can interfere by modifying or uploading further material via the hotel website to the project database and image choice. Being able to add their personal material to the window on one side and the picture frame on the other wall, they create their very own ficticious presence in the installation room. They are also able to ring up the gallery visitors via a specially designed web-telephone interface.
A web cam is streaming real time video from the hotel to the website to document the ongoing changes.

A hotel as such stands for an anonymous social melting pot in a constant state of flux -
The Imaginary Hotel further mirrors digital travel in a distorted concept of space and time. It represents a virtual retreat accommodating permanently migrating residents. Similar to a blank canvas, the vacant room is successively populated and shaped by individuals. Real and virtual guests arrive, meet and disappear from out of nowhere and leave their personal traces, reflecting the seamless border between physical and imaginative places of being.

The premiere took place at the Chapman Gallery in Salford between October 9th and 31st, 2002 and was further linked to the Cornerhouse, Manchester and the Folly Gallery, Lancaster, where visitors were able to interact with the gallery installation and its audience from a special net-terminal.