This was easily the video that I had the most fun making in the past five years, and now that I can upload it in one piece to youtube I can present it here for easy viewing. Its a fictional architectural tale (from 2007) about the forces of tourism and consumption. About how they transform locations of historical significance, setting up tense but productive relationships between a place's factual past, its current economic imperatives, and the private engagement of both visitors and inhabitants with their own version of its importance. The parable is told through the journey of one character who brings to life, and weaves together the issues explored in the work, eventually turning into a sort of contemporary architectural ruin factory. The full film below:
The explanation film below runs through all the concepts and ideas that fed into and structured both the film, and the architectural explorations around it. The previous year I had gotten rather wound up by some of Baudrillard's writing (oddly enough, Im reading a new edition of
America right now), and this work was something of a reaction to his gloomy paradoxes about contemporary culture... i had wanted to approach the kitsch of tourism with an appreciative eye. Even though overall it maybe a somewhat despairing tale about the misapprehension of substantive relationships between form and meaning, it does locate points of interest within that ubiquitous way of approaching places and things, which eventually led in more propositional forms to the following project, the
Church of Perpetual Experimentation, and subsequent investigations.
These are some of the models, and one drawing (
more here) from the work's development.
