Halloween 2024: Fathom PDX

Written by Jonathan Wojcik


A logo resembling a stylized space helmet with tentacles


   It was some time in the summer of 2024 that my spouse and I noticed this mysterious logo on the door of a building in Portland, Oregon, though this was from the street on a drive home, and whatever this logo indicated, it didn't look like something that was open at the time.

   Looking it up later, it was vaguely described as some sort of "art collective" currently presenting something called "Fathom," which was described even more vaguely and strangely as some kind of interactive experience involving an "alien reality." It obviously sounded worth looking into, but different things kept getting in the way of checking it out.


   Later, in August, we would visit "Portland Weird Fest," a relatively brand new event that includes a local art market and music venue, where we would also this adorable roaming mascot of a giant, one-eyed sea-urching sort of creature. This turned out to be Flotsam, and Flotsam's job was to advertise.....Roboto Octopodo's "Fathom!" Still, a couple of months would go by before we'd ever get around to seeing what exactly a Roboto Octopodo's Fathom actually is, which we finally managed to do in November. As it turned out, October was originally expected to be their last month, but they managed to extend their lease all the way to February of 2025, so if you're reading this before then and you're local to the area, you've still got a chance to see it for yourself! The rest of you will unfortunately need to fold space-time.


   Fathom had a $20 entry fee, comparable to the cost of a higher-end Haunted House event. It also had some similarities to one, but it was so much more unique than that, with so much love put into it, the ticket price is practically a steal. When you enter, you're greeted by staff dressed in lab coats, gloves and goggles, who introduce you in-character to the storyline: they're an independent organization researching interdimensional anomalies, and have discovered a portal into another reality. Fortunately, everything in this reality seems to be benign, and now they're taking "volunteers" to help study and understand its inhabitants. You're given a pair of optional paper glasses that make everything look like a kaleidoscope, and a clipboard with your "research goals" - a scavenger hunt on one side, an alien cipher on the other!

   At this point, we still didn't know what exactly Fathom was going to be or what it would look like, which is why I haven't shown you any photos just yet. Instead, here's the first thing we saw:


Galactic See Anemone (Fact File)

   Inside the event space, Fathom is lit by blue lighting and the occasional blacklight bulb, built to resemble a fantastical coral reef from another world. One of the first things greeting visitors is the "See Anemone," a giant mass of nubby tentacles that's actually a custom designed air-inflated prop, which you're also encouraged to touch, and is supposed to change color as you do so. I actually can't remember if it really did; there was so much to look at, I don't even remember if I tried. You'll also notice the FACT FILE link; deeper into the exhibit was a laminated folder containing the names and bios of over a dozen creatures to find, which also included FLOTSAM:



   Flotsam wasn't actually present for our visit, so it might have driven me nuts wondering where to find it if I didn't know it was a wearable mascot. I wonder what Flotsam was actually off doing at the time?


Telle (Fact File)

   "Weight: About an Hour" is such a funny thing to say about a sea monster. Telle is a large, hanging sculpture of a nonspecific abyssal fish, though quite similar to the real life telescope fish, with huge white eyeballs and lots of long, hooked teeth. But while a telescope fish is named for its powerful, tubular eyes, Telle is named for the fact that it can apparently stretch out to 1000x its original length!


Oh Whale (Fact File)

   This was the third thing that caught our attention, because it's in basically the dead center of the entry area and one of the biggest creatures visible. A sculpture of a pure white, blind looking whale with fuzzy fringes, its great little bio tells us that it feeds on "electroplankton" and that its songs "travel backwards in time." It's also one of the most memorable and impressive installations at Fathom, because you can press a button to bring it to life:




Schwormp (Fact File)

"It's not a Crustacean or an Annelid but a third gender altogether." Schwormp is a very large custom-made plush of a coiled, eyeless worm with a shrimp tail color scheme, jagged teeth, a protruding tongue, and also a small hole you can stick your hand in, right behind the head, to puppet the tongue. The Schwormp hangs out on an old couch, presumably for taking little selfies with. What's an old couch doing here?? There's actually a lot of furniture and human objects scattered around, intended to represent things that have been lost into the portal, a nice way of ensuring that necessary furnishings and even the restrooms have an in-universe explanation.


Angie the Anglerfish(Fact File)

   Angie is the second or third largest creature in Fathom, an adorable giant anglerfish put together from nylon fabric with an illuminated illicium, light-up teeth and glowing red eyes (with cute little eyelashes!)

   Best of all, you can walk through Angie to get to another little area of Fathom, her spinal column and ribs cast in green by a blacklight, with a number of dangling organs.


Marx (Fact File)

   Made from insulation foam and doll eyes, "Marx" are important to the Research Scavenger Hunt, since you have to find at least 15 of them. This is the largest one, with the most eyes, but others can be as small as a baseball and hidden just about anywhere. I like the fact that they apparently grow to the size of a "moon," and eventually they reproduce by exploding. Also that they share a hive mind, with all their eyes connected throughout however many realities they've colonized!

   There's even one especially tiny Marx hidden inside multiple, nested treasure chests in one of the very, very furthest back corners of the site. You're also meant to find 10 treasure chests for the hunt, so this is a two for one, or maybe more, if you want to count every box within a box. They don't actually ask you to prove how you came to your answers, mind you, it's just for fun!


Glam Clam (Fact File)

   There's not much you can say about this one; it's a huge illuminated clam that's also built like a bed you can lounge on, and its area also continuously plays 70's music. I'm including every single named creature here, however! There's also that giant, psychedelic swirling light display in the background, which has little tentacles around it, but this wasn't designated as a "creature," so perhaps it isn't supposed to be one?


The Boss (Fact File)

   I'm not sure why this second, smaller anglerfish is named "The Boss," but she's actually hidden behind a wall of coral-like branches, and her fuzzy illicium lights up red at the press of a button.


??????

   "The Boss" also shares her chamber with this fantastic looking alien lifeform, a little reminiscent of the Old Ones from the Mountains of Madness; it has a veiny, barrel shaped body with a gaping cavity in the center, illuminated orange from the inside with webs of tissue stretched across it. It stands atop a tangle of rootlike tentacles, it has a couple of thin ciliated arms, and its head is just a squirmy mass of eye stalks. I'm surprised they didn't give this one a name and bio!


Winky (Fact File)

   This is one of three creatures you can find inside large, vertical metal tubes, which you can duck down and enter through a small doorway. Winky just appears to be a mass of green fur with dangling tendrils suspended from the ceiling of the shaft, until you pull a very satisfying lever to open up its luminous, humanlike giant eye! Though made of fuzzy material, it's "canonically" made of slime.


The Grackle (Fact File)

   This other tube-dweller is a foam sculpture of a warty green frog-like monster, hanging upside down, with multiple layers of teeth in its big lamprey-like sucker mouth. This one isn't directly interactive, but the rings of teeth are constantly spinning independently of one another! "Spinning tooth grackle" is another of the Research subjects you're meant to make note of.


Slimy Baby (Fact File)

   I'm reviewing these in the order we saw them, but as Creature 012, Slimy Baby is meant to be the last one you ever see, its tubular lair right outside the gift shop before you exit. It's a giant, colorless, illuminated version of the baby-headed, 3-d printed rainbow worms you also see here, which were also sold at Fathom's Weird Fest booth. Slimy Baby seems to be kind of their main mascot!


A Mysterious Crab

   This is another "creature" with no name or information given, but it's a crab-shaped metal sculpture large enough to sit under, with a Pringles Mascot kind of mustache and cute, light-up eyestalks. It possibly rivals the size of the Oh Whale. The two guys in lab coats are staff, who stay in character to answer any questions you might have about Fathom or the scavenger hunt.


Giant Jellies

I'd also like to make a note of the huge, hanging jellyfish that were just about everywhere at Fathom, and by now we've looked at almost every prominent "creature" in the exhibit, but it's still not nearly everything there was to see.








   Dozens of artists obviously put an enormous amount of work into Fathom, and it shows; there's an interactive sci-fi console with a "duck drive" and various odd video clips, there's a huge sunken ship with different "dimensions" visible through its portholes, a laser light room, an original motion-capture arcade game, murals on every wall, tiny dioramas hidden in the crevices of a walk-through reef, and even the restrooms are painted like the inside of a monster.


Sadly, there is a single criticism I have to express, and that's the use of obviously AI-generated images in some of the event's online promotional posts. A few of its video screen installations also included AI clips, and I suspect it was also used for the graphics of the motion capture game. The enormous amount of genuine hand-crafted original work throughout Fathom more than makes up for this comparatively minuscule use of generated pseudo-art, but it also underlines just how unnecessary it was to have even that much of it. The AI social media posts don't appear to have gotten much engagement anyway, but could have been real photographs of absolutely anything I just took my own real photographs of.

  If a few algorithmically-simulated "paintings" were all I'd seen promoting Fathom, I might have written it off as something entirely AI-based, or even something that doesn't really exist to begin with; some kind of weird scam or half-baked corporate project. And then I would have missed out, because 99% of Fathom is in fact real, actual artwork by real people who obviously gave it their all to make something truly original.



   It also would have really sucked to miss out on this, because Halloween Season 2024 wasn't just the first year I skipped the usual article marathon; it was also the first year in decades that I didn't go to any haunted houses, haunted rides or "Halloween"-specific events, and that still feels weird - like I missed something important, somehow - but Fathom was honestly closer to what I always really wanted from a Halloween walk-through anyway. Not a narrow, dark passage you're rushed through to make way for the next group, but an open area full of strange, imaginative and cool displays to explore at your own pace. Maybe I just feel that way because I go to these things to see the craftsmanship, rather than to get "scared." This whimsical, interactive SCP Containment Breach resembled nothing I've personally seen since the heartbreaking discontinuation of Fright Town just a year after I found it, and that didn't even have an interactive element.




In the gift shop, you could even "adopt a Marx;" no two of them the same! And if you happened to translate the alien language puzzle, you could whisper the resulting phrase to the cashier and get...well, a very tiny sticker of that same phrase, so it's a spoiler anyway. I wouldn't play the game for the sake of the mysterious prize, but it's the thought that counts!

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