Dream House Research Articles

Optimization of house purchase recommendation system (HPRS) using genetic algorithm

<span>This paper presents the optimization of house purchase recommendation system (HRPS) using Genetic Algorithm. Everyone in this world has their own dream house and plan to purchase it depending on their budget and based on the house preferences. Homebuyers face problem in comparing the house property websites according to the factors during the house survey. Subsequently, it is time-consuming in making the decision and they need to bear the transportation cost as they will need to travel to one house developer office to another. In addition, some of the homebuyers felt disappointed when their expectations were not met. Thus, in order to optimize the preferences, in this paper, we present a web-based house purchase recommendation system (HPRS) using a genetic algorithm. Then, it follows by test the functionality and usability of the system. As a result, the system found to function accordingly and obtain more than the average score of system usability scale testing. For further research, it is recommended to add more data to the database and compare with other algorithms.</span>

Financial Crisis, Bad Debt and Uncollectible Receivables: Evidence from UAE

This study aims to study the methods used in accounting for calculating bad debts in a financial setting and comparing it with the debt collection methods in an academic environment in UAE especially in Abu Dhabi University. It also focuses on exploring the reasons behind defaulting payments in an academic setting and finally recommending a sample policy for debt collection an academic environment has been demonstrated. It is clearly that the non-performing loans prevailing in the UAE could be twofold in the coming years due to a constant surge in the credit demand, and the banks as well as financial institutions cannot agree on debt collection policies. The position of UAE in context is still better than many other countries. However, this will negatively affect the financial positions of the organizations if proper policies are not in place for the debt collection procedures. The credit demand is going to increase as more and more people are keen on investing in the real estate sector of the country and prefer taking long term mortgages to finance their dream houses. It must be noted that UAE’s overall receivables was stated as AED 28.2 billion in 2012, which then increased to AED 35.3 billion in 2013, again indicating the surge in demand for credit and the corresponding impact on increase in bad debts. This study concludes that a number of resources were available when it comes to collecting bad debts in banking or financial environment, but collecting bad debts in higher educational institutions was very limited, in the context of UAE

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>

Materi Dakwah dalam Website Dakwatuna.com

Da'wah is a communication practice. Da'wah is one of the communication activities because in da'wah there is a process of transmitting information (messages) from the communicator (da'i, interpreter) to the communicant (mad'u) through various media such as newspapers, radio, television, and the internet. Da'wah activities will be able to run effectively and efficiently when using strategic and appropriate ways of conveying the teachings of Allah SWT. This study aims to find out the da'wah materials found on the website dakwatuna.com. This study uses a qualitative method with a content analysis approach. The focus of this research is the texts contained on the website dakwatuna.com which were published from April to July 2016. The results of the research that the website of dakwatuna.com is part of the propaganda media that presents valuable information, knowledge and articles for people and civilization. The response of internet users is very enthusiastic and extraordinary about the material presented by the website dakwatuna.com. The material presentation on the dakwatuna.com website includes aspects of da'wah material namely aqeedah, sharia and morality. Aqeedah material found in the material do not sacrifice your religion, the prohibition on dreaming of hoping for death, do we remember the traffic jam in the Mahsyar field. In sharia material found in the material of marriage, what is the theme of our Ramadhan, four practices of heaven in one day, zakat is empowering and loving because of Allah. Whereas in the material of morality that is practicing sincerity, three saviors and three destroyers, the dream house and when the mother fell asleep.

Rewriting the South African Pastoral: Pitfalls of the Plaasroman in Craig Higginson’s The Dream House

This paper will consider Craig Higginson’s The Dream House (2015) as a powerful, albeit problematic rewriting of the South African pastoral. Staging his narrative against the backdrop of a farm currently undergoing redevelopment into a residential complex, his Midlands KwaZulu-Natal setting allows the novel to contemplate the land as an ongoing symbol of belonging and dispossession, precarious labour and anxiety, late capitalism and power in the South African ecological vocabulary. Within the specific context of this narrative, the land itself, the unproductive farm, and the animals bred on it, work collectively as a motif for the perpetuation of environmental racism. The climactic confrontation between white landowner and her black protégé stages a reflection of their failed dialogue over the years and resounds with archetypal significance. Their fraught exchange centres around their, respectively, incommensurate memories of the contested farm – offering Looksmart the opportunity to challenge Patricia’s colonial paternalism towards him and the other black employees. Their conversation in tracking their memories and experiences works to reflect political, racial and environmental change in the postcolony. Taking its cue from the work of J.M. Coetzee (White Writing 1988), this paper will consider the degree to which Higginson’s novel presents a meaningful challenge to the plaasroman as a ‘literature of failure’ and what alternatives it opens up in dealing with relationships between possessors and dispossessed in the South African rural economy.

Walter Benja-Memes

This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present moment out of the oppressive vice of classical historiography. While fascism retrenches on “art for art’s sake” in defense of principles of origin, authenticity, and mastery, we envision a politicization of the art of the meme not simply through content but through practice. This paper attempts to engage in this practice through creative invention. We work across two cases, one “real” (Richard Spencer gets punched) and one of our own creation: the viral life and death of Quodlibet, an anachronistic DJ. Our wager is that the blast of now-time that the meme unleashes can be used to lay bare the myth of mastery and open a space for new subjects, forms, and practices. At the same time, we show how the meme is prone to boomerang effects and reterritorializations that can reverse back into fascist aestheticism, the catastrophic status quo, and the dominance of the market. Playfully and without self-seriousness, our goal in this paper is to open the image sphere: to slip into the Internet’s dream house and rummage its drawers for a revolutionary politics.

Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home by Cathryn Hankla

Reviewed by: Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home by Cathryn Hankla Emily Masters (bio) Cathryn Hankla. Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2018. 288 pages. Softcover. $20.00. In her essay collection Lost Places: On Losing and Finding Home, Cathryn Hankla focuses on ways the concept of home manifests in various aspects of her life. Hankla is a poet, novelist, and has written a variety of essays including the ones gathered in Lost Places. Her previously published works include Fortune Teller Miracle Fish (2011), Great Bear (2016), and Galaxies (2017). In Lost Places, she takes readers on a journey to explore many of the places she has physically called home as well as the homes she finds in spiritual places and in other people. The collection includes previously published content, such as "Neighborhood of [End Page 109] Desire," "The Final Frontier," and "Natural Disasters," alongside fresh content for her readers including "God's Eyebrow," an essay examining Hankla's relationship to her mother; "Invisible Cities," a meditation on fighting fears far from home; and "The Indispensable Condition," which offers a place for Hankla to pause and question her beliefs. Themes in Hankla's essay collection include homesickness, staying versus leaving, heartbreak, solitude, loss, love, family, and spirituality. She confronts stereotypes about Appalachia by portraying a complex region throughout her essays, revealing a diversity of experiences. She also paints herself in a complex light, sharing with readers both her triumphs and pitfalls in her search for home. Hankla's writing evokes a wide range of emotional response. Often, readers will find themselves laughing out loud but then will find themselves biting back tears. Hankla uses humor to address moments in her life when she feels like she is losing her sense of self, turning many moments of reflection into chances to connect to readers using laughter. The humor in the collection is balanced by Hankla's ability to turn a phrase, to express descriptions poetically, making scenes come to life on the page and creating emotions readers will feel as if they are their own. In her essay, "Cleaning out the House," Hankla writes, "No substitute for the self, a house can still be a surrogate, experimental self, a personal cabinet of curiosities, an expression of one's tastes and travels, dreams, expectations—and neuroses." Throughout the collection, Hankla reveals herself through her definitions of home. Readers get a glimpse of who she is, of her failed relationships, of her triumphs, of her doubts and vulnerabilities, through a tour of her various homes, both ones in which she dwells like in "Dream House" and ones she returns to again and again like Hankla's writing community in "Scarlet Tanager." [End Page 110] In "Lost Places," the collection's title essay, Hankla characterizes Chaco Canyon in New Mexico as a place she travels for spiritual renewal and reconnection to herself. She is drawn to Chaco because of the mystery of the history, the hidden pieces she likes to imagine, just as she enjoys writing in these essays to uncover aspects of herself and those places which have affected her life. Like all the essays in the collection, the title essay is full of research and literary references Hankla uses to reinforce her themes of home and of self-examination. One of the best essays in the collection, "My Life in Snakes," traces the ways in which snakes have slithered into Hankla's life at seemingly every turn, a constant in a world where at times, her definition of home is forever shifting. The snakes are haunting, yet familiar, primordial. The shift from fear to familiarity shows how adaptable humans are to make any place their home, although some homes might call out to us more than others. Hankla's writing throughout the essays will be relatable to readers who have ever felt out of place, homesick, or found a fluidity to their definitions of home. While almost all of the essays in Lost Places fit in with themes of home, "Place as Language" sticks out like a sore thumb. It is more a meditation on novelist William Goyen's work than an examination on Hankla...

Playing possum, and: me and the king, and: Sul ponticello

playing possum, and: me and the king, and: Sul ponticello Alina Stefanescu playing possum after Bayard Rustin This is my mother newly dead, Mom says. She died without suffering. I fondle the photo of my maternal grandmother playing possum. A dead possum in a ditch is called roadkill. A possum who's just playing is not a carcass. The women in my family will play anything to make you wonder. I am one of those women who finds herself playing. Just to see what you'd say about me then. The woman in the photo is my namesake. The photo is black and white, taken and developed by my grandfather. He was a gangly husband, a polymath, her fellow physician. They married in med school. Stars of the show, those two. It was my tall reticent grandfather who administered the final morphine injection when the cancer took over her brain—when she was no longer the person she might recognize. He did this in secret without consulting the family. He did it in the living room of the remote Transylvanian chalet he designed and built by hand. Her green and white wooden dream house, a retreat for their retirement. He did it because she wanted to remain herself. She made him promise. She made him promise again. She said if you love me . . . He signed her request with a blue fountain pen from Czechoslovakia. The request lay among papers and photos he preserved, images of her naked breasts, a voile nightgown, [End Page 114] smiling sepia, Alina, winsome, hungry, amorous, and finally, finally, faceless. Two slender hands crossed in languor over her lower chest. An Orthodox cross poised above the v-shaped limbs. A flock of birds on their way to warmer shores. Above their wings, a cardboard icon. "I am an atheist now," he announced. But no one believed a man who hated God so much could ever come to disbelieve Himself. This was Ceausescu's communist Romania. I know hate is a kind of hope. These lines in my hand, a Balkan mutation. me and the king In a Transylvanian village they speak of a kingwho laughs with one eye and weeps with the other.He keeps me company in the valley between city buildings. Have you ever wept when losing your journal in Manhattan?I cry with one eye and lie with another. Hop the subway to Coney Island so a mermaid can recovermy story. At least one story in life needs a mermaid to endthings. And the sky is too much—the sky is a certaintinge of fire when the poet accuses,the podium weeps. Sul ponticello The verb for longing in Romanian is a mouthfulof moist mountain soil. [End Page 115] Our betrothal avertedlike eyes across a wooden pewwe divide what we must equal from the trothwhere swine sink their snouts. Has it been years oryards, fond ache-rage? A fathom measures the distance between a pair of outstretched arms.Still you hold me like Jell-Osul ponticello. On the porch,in the kitchen, near a sink sunset cannot overcome its habitual marvel:gilded tongue, scalded marrow I cannot linger Farbehind your palm's urge knowingany body is a bowtuned to tremble tangled limbs, mottledfruits, minor ninth. [End Page 116] Copyright © 2019 University of Nebraska Press

Book Review: Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House

Book Review: Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House

House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery by Liz Rosenberg

Reviewed by: House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery by Liz Rosenberg Karen Coats Rosenberg, Liz House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery; illus. by Julie Morstad. Candlewick, 2018 [352p] ISBN 978-0-7636-6057-4 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7-10 In prose that often rivals that of her subject for its lyricism, Rosenberg presents an honest look at a woman who, while providing some of literature’s happiest moments, wavered between extremes of emotion herself. Exquisitely sensitive to both beauty and pain, Maud Montgomery suffered bouts of severe depression throughout her life, a condition exacerbated by the circumstances she endured. Following the death of her mother when she was two, Maud was also abandoned by her beloved father, who left her in the care of her stern grandparents as he moved west and started a new family. While her father and grandfather refused to support her, her grandmother dipped into her own savings to enable Maud to further her education, though not as much as the bookish Maud craved. Meanwhile, she attracted several suitors, experienced a tepid, broken engagement and a secret, more passionate but doomed relationship, and finally married Ewan Macdonald. Their marriage was not a happy one, and Rosenberg reveals the mental health issues suffered by both Maud and Ewan; disappointments with their wayward son, Chester; loss of dear friendships to early deaths; obsession with the world wars; and legal problems with her publisher that plagued Maud’s final years and led to her own untimely death, either by suicide or accidental overdose. Fans of Montgomery’s fiction will be struck by how closely she hewed to the episodes of her own life while redeeming them in her fiction, replacing tragedy and dissatisfaction with desires fulfilled. A timeline and references are included, and each chapter is fronted by a nostalgic and delicate pen-and-ink illustration that adds piquancy by capturing the light-hearted side of the beloved author. [End Page 444] Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Labyrinth

The Labyrinth Tim Horvath (bio) Dreamlives of Debris Lance Olsen Dzanc Books www.dzancbooks.org/our-books/dreamlives-of-debris-by-lance-olsen 296 Pages; Print, $16.95 In the world of contemporary classical music, it isn't uncommon for composers to bend, stretch, and manipulate the physical environment of performance–spatiality, in other words, is fair game. Last year, I witnessed a performance of John Luther Adams's "Ten Thousand Birds" at MassMOCA in which listeners were invited to wander around, kneel, sprawl–there was nary an armrest, nor a place to kick back with either languor or critical poise, and say, "Ah, this is how it's supposed to sound." And this is nothing new; in 1994, LaMonte Young created The Dream House, tantalizingly described by Kyle Gann: Walk into The Base 9:7:4 Symmetry and you'll hear a whirlwind of pitches swirl around you. Stand still, and the tones suddenly freeze in place. Within the room, every pitch finds its own little niche where it resonates, and with all those close-but-no-cigar intervals competing in one space....you can alter the harmony you perceive simply by pulling on your earlobe... Moving your head makes those tones leap from high to low and back.... Given that so much of the "performance" of reading takes place invisibly and internally, perhaps it is no surprise that contemporary fiction writers have strayed less from the spatial conventions of the page; the expectation holds, by and large, that we read from left to right and top to bottom, in English at least. Naturally there are plenty of exceptions, from the typographic and graphic carnival of Danielewski's The Familiar (2015) to Jennifer Egan's PowerPointillism, but few have treated the spatial dimensions of the literary page as more up for grabs than Lance Olsen, whose Dreamlives of Debris is merely the latest in a ongoing series of provocations that poke and prod at our sense of how a story can be told, felt, assimilated. Calendar of Regrets (2010) masterfully weaves a rich, multitextured tapestry of loosely-nested narratives, while Head in Flames (2009) takes our instinctive ability to switch points of view and pushes it to a frenzied extreme in what amounts to a sort of perspectival perfect storm. More recently, Theories of Forgetting (2014), lacking even an obvious entrance, invites us to climb in through several windows, and has us rotating the book, our eyes scanning the margins, imbibing photographs, maps, handwritten commentary, x-rays, and other narrative detritus in ways that evoke the spiral jetty, one of its primary leitmotifs. And as though unable to contain itself on the page or be contained, Forgetting spawned a walk-through novel, a collaborative video exhibition with filmmaker (and spouse) Andi Olsen, entitled "There's No Place Like Time," which conjures the entire career of an imagined filmmaker complete with personal reminiscences and critical commentary; to call it a "spin-off" would only be to lowball the extent to which we were already spinning. All of which brings us to Debris, whose relatively tame appearance–no actual rotation necessary!–belies the radical nature of both its own challenges and its bountiful yields. In this case, Olsen has narrowed the aperture, and the resulting taut, concentrated outbursts of text, aphoristic and often syntactically skewed or ruptured, uncannily mimic the experience of dwelling in and moving through a dark labyrinth. Debris is the self-bestowed name of the Minotaur, in this case recast by Olsen as a girl with deformities and unusual gifts, and like her, we must cobble together meaning through sensations, introspection, and speculation punctuated by the occasional epiphany. In this unlikely guide, Olsen has not only created one of his most indelibly haunting protagonists, but has effectively transplanted us within her consciousness; the labyrinth echoes Plato's Cave in its darkness, literal and epistemological, but departs radically from it insofar as Debris is deeply, profoundly embodied. Thus we feel not only the "sparse hair tufs patching [her] body" and "the lump rising from [her] left shoulder," but we are with her as "the ceiling sinks without warning" and she "crawl[s] on [her] belly through the...

Collaborating to remember collaborative design: An exploratory study

We examine the ways in which members of a small group coordinate their memories, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are co-designing their dream house and then collaborative remembering that previous interactive encounter. Our analyses show the following: (1) participants structured collaborative design and collaborative remembering sessions in different ways (e.g. linear and sequential vs iterative and hierarchically structured, respectively); (2) higher degrees of knowledge building were temporally synchronized with higher degrees of interactivity during both tasks; (3) collaborative remembering did not only follow the spatial structure of successive elements of the dream-house design session, but it was also proceeded by associations between semantic elements of the discourse; and (4) participants collaboratively remember better what initially generated most joint activity during collaborative design. This research thus contributes to understanding of collaborative remembering processes with respect to a knowledge-rich collaborative task.

Houses of Straw: Grand Designs and the Presentation of Architectural Design on Television

ABSTRACTThe UK television program Grand Designs, in which participants engage in the design and construction of their dream houses has, over a period of fourteen years, done much to educate a lay audience about the design of domestic buildings. In this paper we analyze two episodes of the program, both featuring houses constructed using straw bales. Our analysis considers three ways in which the show frames design issues and participants for the viewer. First, we look at how concepts of sustainability are presented; second, we explore the different ways in which expertise is enacted; and third, we discuss how design as a process, and architecture as a discipline, are represented. Within the episodes we analyze, we find that, on the one hand Grand Designs seems to be architecturally progressive (in furthering a discourse of “sustainability,” and accurately reflecting the “reality” of design), but on the other hand, it can be interpreted as just the opposite since, through problematizing notions of “expertise,” the show actually favors tradition over innovation, and emphasizes individual brilliance over collaboration and compromise.

Merzbau, the grave of the logocentric self: He who screams becomes the space

This article will discuss the Merzbau in Hannover as a "para-architecture" experience and as a doctrine on environmental comfort, connected to intense mnemonic feeling and relaxation. The Merzbau, the Gothic cubic "Traumhaus" (dream house) by Kurt Schwitters, is depicted here as a laboratory of sensory stimuli where an aesthetic control of oblivion, and of annoyance, has been practiced.

Essay Two: MASHUP AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY: REVIEWING AND RIFFIN'

MASHUP AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY: REVIEWING AND RIFFIN'[1] “Arcades are houses or passages having no outside - like the dream”.[2] “Dream houses of the collective: arcades, winter gardens, panorama, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations”.[3] Sponsors: There's a problem, feathers, iron[4] [5] https://www.kegsteakhouse.com/

EMPTY SPACE

1 0 1 R E M P T Y S P A C E W I L L S C H U T T I can’t see what this couple sees outside; outside’s a blank to me. They point past the windshield at restaurants where they’ve eaten once, or thought of eating, as if they’d rounded Neptune rather than the H-mart, a Haitian grocer’s, their favorite, far-flung food truck. The man, who’s made a point of driving, points to a building on the corner, a gray wall, a gray nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, iron railings, beside the door a plaque bearing some braille-like inscription, stone quarried in Maine, maybe, and carted south. There’s where I write, he says, pretending he’s picturing himself inside at work rather than doing what he’s doing, showing o√ to the other man, the man I call my man or dear or sweetie (how haven’t I come up with something better than sweetie yet?), sitting shotgun, nodding like a dashboard toy. Cool, cool, he answers. I don’t see what he could see in both them and me. I try. Before we married, we’d been working di√erent hours – he by day at school, me nights at the restaurant. We’d hardly wasted an entire afternoon together when he kneeled and asked, and I said sure. Sure is all I said. What did he want me to say? That I’d wanted nothing more? 1 0 2 Y Or that we’d want for nothing? I felt embarrassed. I felt like I was the one bending. Now we do what others do: Sunday brunch, the occasional excursion to see friends, his friends, always writer friends, long talks about the future and plans to travel. We’ve even gone some places: the Irish coast, an empty wedge of Canada. Wherever we go, there comes a time when he turns to me and says, ‘‘What if we left our place? You know, for someplace more like this.’’ I thought it cute at first, him usually half in the bag, the thin shank of a meal on our plates, talk of change, and the day done, shut up, good-byed, the light changing easy, easily changing us, I felt. But we go, we see places, and then we’re home, toting a scarf, a bottle of oil, a couple books he reads, or reads part of then shelves or discards, more plans to travel, to live healthier, be happier. ‘‘Happy was one of your father’s words,’’ my mother’d say. ‘‘That and home. ‘Honey,’ he’d say, ‘I’m going to buy us a home with a blue pond on the property.’ Believe me, his dream house had swans flock to it.’’ A wedge, I think they’re called a wedge of swans. ‘‘He was a sweet man, your father. Sweet but on the stupid side.’’ Going back, it’s the man’s wife’s turn to point, to tell me something more, I hope, than the location of her gym, her co√ee shop, to tell me what we have in common isn’t the backseat and yoga pants. But she just points out there, perfectly spaced, a perfectly square space between us, atlas-sized, the width of a light read. I look past her finger . . . Nothing much, 1 0 3 R buildings with the roofs slumped, built on foundations of steam, tacky gold church towers, like oil cruets, parks that serve no discernible purpose, no people in them, empty space . . . They remind me of woods that flank the freeways; you think they’re there to hide what’s behind them. Before his accident, when my dad still drove me home from school in his showy, used, blue BMW my mother was embarrassed to be seen in, I thought they must be hiding love, an extra city. Then I grew up and those spaces didn’t fool me anymore. They couldn’t fool me even when I wanted to be fooled. ...

Dream House on Golan Drive by David G. Pace

Dream House on Golan Drive by David G. Pace

Client perceptions of satisfaction and value for money in the employment of architects on private house projects

Clients' perceptions of the satisfaction and value for money in employing architects are a major factor influencing their architect-seeking behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate clients' perceptions of satisfaction and value for money when employing architects on small private house projects in Ghana. Using phenomenological studies, two themes and eight sub-themes were uncovered: competence and capabilities (performance; age and experience; availability and accessibility; service quality) and cost of engagement (cost of fees; fee flexibility; fee standardisation; convenience). The findings indicate among other things that clients found engaging an architect to be a needlessly arduous and expensive venture. Clients felt architects needed to be employed only on dream house projects. Furthermore, clients found it difficult to guesstimate architects' fees prior to their engagement. The study reveals information that will improve architects' understanding of the nature of clients, ensuring successful client-architect collaborations on house projects.

Client perceptions of satisfaction and value for money in the employment of architects on private house projects

Clients' perceptions of the satisfaction and value for money in employing architects are a major factor influencing their architect-seeking behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate clients' perceptions of satisfaction and value for money when employing architects on small private house projects in Ghana. Using phenomenological studies, two themes and eight sub-themes were uncovered: competence and capabilities (performance; age and experience; availability and accessibility; service quality) and cost of engagement (cost of fees; fee flexibility; fee standardisation; convenience). The findings indicate among other things that clients found engaging an architect to be a needlessly arduous and expensive venture. Clients felt architects needed to be employed only on dream house projects. Furthermore, clients found it difficult to guesstimate architects' fees prior to their engagement. The study reveals information that will improve architects' understanding of the nature of clients, ensuring successful client-architect collaborations on house projects.

La Monte Young Trio for Strings Original Full Length Version, Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House, New York City

Stepping inside the Dia Art Foundation's transformed gallery space in the heart of Chelsea is a special experience in itself. Darkly dressed ushers closely watch over your every move, preserving what is for the average audience member today a strikingly uncommon concert experience. ‘Turn off all cell phones, remove your shoes, and remain completely silent while in the Dream House’. Free of everyday noise and distractions, this unassuming venue is converted into an almost reverential space of mystical quasi-worship. The air is thick with the fragrance of incense and the floor is covered wall-to-wall with plush white carpet. Blends of deep magenta and rich blue light illuminate the space. In the centre of the room, facing the stage area, are three dark figures – the curators of this numinous sensory environment (La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Jung Hee Choi) – sitting silently on swivel chairs. They sit, literally elevated above the audience, which is relegated to the carpet. There are no chairs for mere onlookers, only small pillows, and not nearly enough for everyone. Most find themselves at points during the marathon-length evening lying prostrate: to rest aching backs and arms, but mostly just to take it all in.