A walk through Vitality AZ
Vitality AZ is a concept for a shared space I’ve expanded and refined for about a decade. My goal here is to not motivate, justify, or explain it. Rather, to the best of my abilities, describe what being there looks and feels like. This is a story through the eyes of one customer’s interaction with the space.
This post is based on notes I wrote in late fall 2025.
Vitality AZ: Neighbor Experience Story
You are a neighbor of mine. Walking down the street, you see a neon sign that reads: Vitality AZ. Inside you see a diner? Yes, but no. An arcade? Yes, but not quite. A movie theatre? Also true, but what Is this space, which is effortlessly all three?
Inside, the air is cool, quiet, and energized. Upfront, there is a table with printed materials, media, and local event information. A neighborhood bulletin board pins frayed flyers of those looking for roommates, guitar lessons for $25, and calls for church groups.
There is a counter service cafe with people at shared tables, bar tops, and in couches with low coffee tables. Some people work intently on their laptops, others scroll their phones, a group of business men problem solve over a pile of papers. At some 3 inch wide tables, two teenagers whisper sweet nothings into one another’s ear.
Vitality AZ is broken into two spaces: upfront a cafe, bright and familiar. Beyond the unique aesthetic, and a wall of mugs with copper nameplates and a sign reading “Member Mugs: all day happy hour”, this place is nothing out of the ordinary. However, a glowing neon sign glows: Slopodeon Open. It calls your attention to the back of the space. What’s this? A media theatre, arcade, and bar. A true speakeasy - a spectacle rich with sound, color, and interaction. Nothing performative like walking through a fake bank vault or a barber’s mirror to buy $20 cocktails with poorer balance than an elephant perched on a nail.
You are asked to leave your phone in your pocket while in the theatre, and if you leave your phone in a cubby, you will win free game tokens for the arcade games and media displays. You agree and receive a fist full of “slopcoins”. A bar divides the front and back, and is set up to allow self service food, even drinks. A hand-painted sign reads: “FREE GAME TOKENS for Members.” There are couches with people eating off TV trays, watching an animated film from Estonia. You decide to buy a drink.
After sharing a drink at an Apple free bar, you indulge in nostalgia, playing surreal games with joy sticks, printers, and robots. Like any theatre, phones must stay in your pocket. Without people on their phones, watching TikToks of men slipping on snow or shorts of NBA highlights, the crowd is naturally drawn into one another. You’ve seen it happen. Remove the phone and people talk. You are convinced this place is something special and how power.
There are phantasms galore in the Slopodeon theatre + arcade. Short throw projectors display images you’ve never seen; new forms of digital media, games, sounds, and text. On one game titled “Office Run”, a player uses a joystick to help his character escape an empty office building. The player doesn’t realize that behind each closed door is a hyperloop back to a previous state in the game. A Borges-Kafka hellscape with the atmosphere of Dilbert. The game never ends, and the player ultimately gives up to the almight. Across the way, on a large screen people draw a picture of “A rat weightlifting” together. At another game named Picture Telephone, different people add elements to a growing exquisite corpse, but adding one element removes a randomly sampled element from the past. What types of collective vitality can we make if we don’t let TikTok get in the way of our screen time?
Next to the games is a new media piece called “Octopus”: a network of TV and computer screens, showing media collected from interactions having taken place in the theatre. It is an octopus like network of AV fuzz, LED, sodium ion, neon, and sound. One screen shows a map with a cross hairs. A neighbor sitting at the bar uses a joystick to update a target, then presses record. He tells a story of his memory of his first time eating at a restaurant. You hear him say: “El Rey (currently Guayo's El Rey) on Sullivan Street in Miami, AZ. I was a kid in the 1950's. First time I ate in a restaurant, because our family always ate at home. The food was great and it's still open today and run by generations of the same family since the 1930's.” The map marks the time and place on the screen. It has been saved, documented, and will help Vitality AZ promote local stories and networks.
You bump into a cute girl in the Slopodeon. She asks you about your holidays and if you have a favorite cousin. You suspect she’s an actor patron, but you don’t mind because she’s authentic and cute. She goes her way and refils her Arizona Sun Tea members cup.
In the back of Vitality AZ, in the back of Slopodeon, is the brain network of the operation: a story studio and content laboratory. This is where I spend my days working, recording and producing the story content for the community. Developing surveys, planning events, and organizing local networks. Training local youth and college students in the research skills I’ve spent years refining. Where I ask any neighbor to come up to me, tell me their thoughts, and to develop media and technology alongside me.
Together, we will create a space unlike anywhere else in the world.
