look back on olympus perspective playground: a traveling series of room-sized dreamworlds

rooms built for the camera

The Olympus Perspective Playground, a short-run and site-specific series of exhibitions, was traveling across Europe between 2013 — 2017. The concept saw artists, designers, and technicians constructing sequences of immersive environments which photography enthusiasts and professionals were invited to explore with a camera in hand.

Conceived by Studio Leigh Sachwitz and produced by flora&faunavisions (not The Storytelling Company), the interactive project operates as a fully built system. Walls, lighting rigs, circulation paths, and signage are developed together with each installation, so the experience reads as one continuous spatial script. Visitors received an Olympus camera at entry, and from that point forward, every room is calibrated for use through the lens. They left with an SD card filled with images, though the more interesting takeaway was how each space taught them to look.

It began with early editions in Berlin in 2013 — 2015, then expanded into a traveling format through cities like Hamburg, Amsterdam, Zürich, Vienna, and Munich. It finally culminated in a larger-scale iteration at Palais de Tokyo in 2017 before returning to Kraftwerk Berlin later that year.

a framework for dreaming in built space

The Olympus Perspective Playground is a practical exercise in constructing environments that hold imagination without drifting into abstraction. Each installation gives form to a specific visual condition, and each condition is tied to a spatial decision you can trace.

Take Numen/For Use’s Tube (see here). A suspended, flexible tunnel stretches through the volume, made from tensile fabric that responds to body weight. As you climb inside, the structure compresses and expands, changing the curvature of the surface around you. The camera reads these shifts as a continuous field, removing edges and corners. The space becomes a soft envelope that records movement as distortion.

Liz West’s Our Colour Reflection (see here) works differently. Here, mirrored panels and suspended filters divide the room into angled fragments. Colored light passes through acrylic sheets and bounces across reflective surfaces, so every step produces a new alignment of hues. You can track the geometry in plan, yet the photograph flattens it into layered color fields. The room teaches how reflection can build depth without adding physical mass.

building conditions for imagination

In Vanishing Point by United Visual Artists (see here), linear light elements extend across the room in strict alignment. The setup relies on perspective: from one position, the lines converge into a single point. Step aside, and the composition breaks apart. The installation makes viewpoint a structural component. It shows how a room can be built around a single optical condition, then held together through alignment.

Sven Meyer and Kim Pörksen’s Sonic Water (see here) introduces sound and liquid as active materials. Vibrations travel through water, creating visible patterns that shift in real time. The basin, lighting, and audio system are tuned together, so the surface becomes both instrument and image generator. Photographing it freezes a moment that the body experiences as continuous motion.

the traveling series of little dreamworlds

Across its iterations, from early editions in Berlin to the expanded version at Palais de Tokyo, the Olympus Perspective Playground grows in scale and technical range. Later versions incorporate microscopy and endoscopy, extending the idea of spatial exploration beyond the human scale. You move from room-sized installations into images generated from inside materials or bodies, yet the logic stays consistent. Each environment is built around a condition that can be tested, recorded, and understood through use.

These installations do not ask for interpretation first. They lend a set of spatial tools and let you work through them. Mirrors, tensioned fabric, projected light, vibrating water. Each one is tuned so that a camera can translate the experience into an image that carries some of the space with it.

Imagination is framed as something you can prototype. Each room acts as a small environment where a single idea is pushed far enough to become tangible. Moving from one space to the next, visitors start to read the ‘playground’ as a series of tests. Some rely on geometry, others on material behavior, others on perception shaped by light.

project info:

name: Olympus Perspective Playground (formerly Olympus Photography Playground)

locations: Berlin, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Zürich, Vienna, Munich, Paris

dates: 2013 — 2017

concept, curation: Studio Leigh Sachwitz
production, exhibition design: flora&faunavisions
collaborators: site-specific installations by international and local artists including Numen/For Use, Liz West, United Visual Artists, Sven Meyer + Kim Pörksen, Maser, and others