I am happy to announce that my video installation "C'était un Rendez-Vous Numerique" is currenty on display at the SPEED Limits exhibition, an art project masterminded by Jeffrey Schapp, Stanford Humanities Lab's co-director and co-organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, Canada and the Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach.
The exhibition addresses the pivotal role played by speed in modern life: from art to architecture and urbanism to graphics and design to economics to the material culture of the eras of industry and information. It marks the centenary of the foundation of the Italian Futurist movement.
According to Jeffrey Schnapp,
"SPEED limits is a mixed reality exhibition project concerned with themes of speed and slowness in modern culture that will: a) pioneer a participatory approach to museum-based informal learning, targeted at youth, with the aim of transforming infrequent museum-goers into active content producers and curators; and b) contribute to the implementation and launch of a new virtual world platform. It represents a partnership between SHL, the Canadian Center for Architecture (lead venue for the physical exhibition), the Wolfsonian-FIU (partner), with the Bornholms Kunstmuseum (Bornholms, Denmark) as a major collaborator.
In an inversion of standard museological practice, the virtual-3d-world version of the show will serve as the original (and include ten galleries that have no physical counterpart) and the real-world show as the support.
Virtual visitors will be provided with a “press kit” that comprises all objects in the exhibition; simple but powerful in-world modeling, rendering, and editing tools; and support for production of show-related machinima. Outreach to schools and universities in the vicinity of host cities (Montreal, Miami, throughout Denmark) and worldwide, will be combined with public design competitions in order to develop the contents of five “public” virtual galleries to which will be added another five professionally curated ones. Contents from the visitor-generated galleries will, in turn, be folded back into the physical installation. " (Jeffrey Schnapp, SHL)
My contribution, "C'etait un rendez-vous numerique", is a re-imagining of Claude Lelouch's infamous 1976 short "C'etait un rendez-vous" a homage to the Futurists fetish for speed. It is based on Bizarre Creations' Project Gotham Racing 4. It consists of nine different screens showing nine virtual races through nine virtual cities. Each screen depicts a different ride in a different location of Project Gotham Racing 4, but unlike the videogame, this installation is non-interactive: each race is a video recording of a nine minute ride, shown in a continuous loop.
Additional information and a full (critical) description of the project can be found here.
This is the first piece of a trilogy.
Here is the press release: Download Speed_PressRelease_20090519_eng
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