This article examines the Labyrinth, a multi-screen pavilion created by the National Film Board of Canada for the Montréal World Exposition in 1967. Within the Labyrinth, audiences were corralled through three chambers, each containing immersive multimedia environments that were designed to represent the chapters of an essential human life. The National Film Board envisaged the Labyrinth as a ‘new kind of instrument for communication […] created by the marriage of two ordinarily unrelated fields — the art of cinema and the art of architecture’. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the exact nature of this marriage of mediums. We will specifically focus on assessing the ways by which architectural space curated the phenomenological and epistemological relation that the audience had with the cinematic presentations in each chamber. Based on archival and primary sources, our research traces the design development of the Labyrinth and interprets its significance by employing Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of visual and acoustic space. As such, the article demonstrates how the Labyrinth modulated the balance between meaningful and affective modes of communication within its telling of the human story.

中文翻译：

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作为沉浸式多媒体环境的迷宫：67 年世博会的马歇尔·麦克卢汉

本文考察了迷宫，这是一个由加拿大国家电影委员会为 1967 年蒙特利尔世界博览会创建的多屏展馆。在迷宫中，观众被围在三个房间内，每个房间都包含沉浸式多媒体环境，旨在代表章节的基本人类生活。国家电影局将迷宫设想为“一种新的交流工具[……]，由两个通常不相关的领域——电影艺术和建筑艺术——结合而成”。本文的目的是评估这种媒介联姻的确切性质。我们将特别关注评估建筑空间如何策划观众与每个房间的电影展示之间的现象学和认识论关系。基于档案和主要来源，我们的研究追溯了迷宫的设计发展，并通过采用马歇尔麦克卢汉的视觉和听觉空间概念来解释其意义。因此，本文展示了迷宫如何在其讲述人类故事的过程中调节有意义和情感交流方式之间的平衡。