What do the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Michael Jackson, Glenda the Good Witch, Hitler, and Santa Claus all have in common? They’ll each be riding the elevator with you at The Standard hotel.

Marco Brambilla’s video installation, Civilization, takes elevator occupants on a journey from heaven to hell and back again, all triggered by the direction of an elevator cab. Working closely with Crush, a video production company, Brambilla sewed together a 3D visual landscape from hundreds of individual film clips. The mural scrolls from hell upward to heaven with brief visits to purgatory along the way, creating and endless loop of surreal planes culled from our collective pop culture consciousness.

A recent trip to The Standard found us captive witnesses to Brambilla’s work. The traditional awkward elevator ride was suddenly transformed into a wild guessing game of what figures would appear next. This is a modern Inferno we can get behind.

Civilization is on permanent view at The Standard in New York.

See the video mural online and read about the process behind it here.