Julijonas Urbonas
Oneiric Hotel (2013)
Concept and design: Julijonas Urbonas
Curator: Justė Kostikovaitė
Assistant curator: Zara Nogueira
Technical assistant: Paulius Vitkauskas
Programmer: Jonas Peteraitis
Costumes: Aistė Nesterovaitė
Logo: Povilas Utovka (Present Perfect)
The Oneiric Hotel is a gravitational dream laboratory, which operates as a temporary hotel, furnished with specialized equipment for sleep observation and lucid dreams, and invites each observer to participate in an artistic-scientific experiment. The project premiered at the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. In Lithuania, the Oneiric Hotel was presented in 2014, at Julijonas Urbonas’s (born 1981) exhibition Standing, Falling, Levitating at the Vartai Gallery. In this project as in his previous ones, the designer seeks to expand the boundaries and goals of the discipline of traditional design, combining knowledge of and experience in design, performance art, medicine, psychology and engineering.
Julijonas Urbonas is one of the foremost experimental designers in Lithuania. He holds a bachelor’s (2003) and master’s (2005) degree from the Department of Design at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. From 2004–2007, he worked as the general manager of an amusement park in Klaipėda. He has been studying for a PhD in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London since 2007 and served as Vice-Rector for Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts since 2014. He creates theoretical and practical interactive design projects, as well as analysing the possibilities and boundaries of the interaction of gravitation, aesthetics, technology and philosophy. In 2010, he was granted the Award of Distinction for his project Talking Doors at the ARS Electronica Festival in Linz. His 2012 project Euthanasia Coaster – a fictional design or one of the most extreme examples of experiential and interactive design – is what made Julijonas Urbonas’s name best known. In 2016, Urbonas’s kinetic installation Airtime represented Lithuania at the XXI Triennale di Milano.