Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.

“Concentration” (soundscape by hanstimm), see description here.

I have been inspired to work on the subject of verticality while reading the book ‘La poétique de l’Espace’ (The poetics of Space) by Gaston Bachelard, and more specifically this translated quotation:

“In addition to the lack of vertical intimate values, one needs to add the lack of cosmology in the houses of big cities. Houses are not there in nature anymore. Relations between home and space become tacit. Everything thereby becomes machine and private life leaks from everywhere.”

Houses and their phenomenology have been studied for a long time. Apartments and vertical buildings are more recent. They still have this image of being the second option, not the ‘real’ home. Reality from Hong Kong looks quite different. What is the imaginary of verticality?

My intuition was to start from the lift: a key component that differentiates vertical buildings from horizontal ones. The small room mediates verticality for its guests and is where its negotiation occurs. I could also have chosen the escalator, another important mediator of verticality in contemporary buildings. But its affiliation with stairs makes it somehow a less original feature, even though many things could be said about its cultural function. The lift has no precedent and reigns in spaces of verticality.

The lift is typically a small room in which guests cannot do anything else than to press on numbered buttons. It never has any seats and is thus not a place to stay; relaxing background music is sometimes played though. The lift might celebrate its own movement, and by extension the verticality of its building, by having large windows giving to its outside. But it denies most often its mobility and doesn’t feature any window. Which doesn’t prevent the image of the long and dark vertically corridor to appear mentally in the passenger’s mind (see the imaginary of the Disney’s Tower of Terror ride for example). The lift feels at the same time a private place, having mirrors that guests can use to check their appearance, and public, with surveillance cameras and the knowledge that everyone on the outside can check the lift’s movement. The ambiguity leads to well known sexual fantasies, breaking also the predictive and functional role of the room.

Through evolution of technology, the lift reduced to the maximum freedom of its passengers. They need to accept its rules if they don’t want to use the stairs. The lift decides who is next, when to open and close the doors, to go either up or down. This generates a lot of frustration and contempt, along with angry insults when the lift is slow to act on passengers requests. They generally accept the rules though because they believe that the lift has been programmed for the best of their interests. Even if they might sometimes doubt that it is intelligent enough to achieve the task.

The lift, and vertical buildings, can be perceived in three different ways closely related to social practices.

Lift as a teletransporter – verticality is a multi-dimensional space

The lift is a teletransporter. It connects a particular location on the ground to a space where people live in the same habitation at the same time, but without knowing the existence of one another. This is what I tried to convey in the following video that was made at my apartment building in Mong Kok, the area with the highest population density in the world (see here a map of teletransporters around the Olympic station, not far from Mong Kok).

“Antechamber” (soundscape by Geography)

This imaginary can only remain if habitants of the building have no significant contacts between one another. If they had, vertical distances between one another’s floor would break the multidimensional representation of space. They are living in the building because they greatly value the location of its entrance, not their neighbours. It might be justified and I don’t necessary make of neighbouring a virtue.

Another interesting aspect of this subjective representation is the emphasis on the ground location and not the verticality of the building, as illustrated in the “Concentration” video. What is the most fascinating in a skyscraper? Is it its height? Or is it the importance given to its location? Why thousands of people would want to be teleported everyday at the entrance door of a single building? While there are so many other geographical coordinates to choose from on earth? The massive appearance of a skyscraper is the material expression of the importance of its location. My video suggests that such a disproportionate interest in specific locations is due to a phenomenon of concentration, a door becomes highly desirable because of the importance given to doors next door. This remains true even when the original singularity becomes anecdotic, and when concentration in itself becomes the significance. The harbour of Hong Kong brought in financial institutions, employees, consumers and finally advertisers.

Lift as a carriage – verticality works just like horizontality

In this representation, the lift is a vertical carriage that goes from one door to another in a long vertical corridor. It doesn’t differ substantially from a horizontal corridor. The vertical building is one that is turned 90 degrees. A sense of proximity with neighbours is possible in this configuration, and all being in one single corridor provides a feeling of equality. But maybe vertically is not the best configuration then. The lift becomes an inconvenient means compared to simply walking to see a neighbour for example. Other considerations are at play: the ones explained in the previous and next chapters, and maybe additional benefits that verticality can bring to the community, such as wider park area (see the Unité d’habitation from Le Corbusier in Marseilles, a ‘vertical village’).

Escalators offer a compromise in a vertical place that doesn’t want to be. Take the huge Langham Place vertical shopping mall in Hong Kong. Its extensive use of escalators, some of the longest around, smoothes the visit that doesn’t need to be interrupted by lifts. The escalators make the place feel more like a horizontal one, more adapted to wandering and temptations.

Lift as a cable car – power in verticality

The lift is a cable car that makes it easy to climb distances sometimes higher than of mounts. Vertical buildings are inspired by human verticality. They allow an overview of a territory and its control. The higher you can see the more power you can exercise on the territory and its people. I’m not a big supporter of analogies between skyscrapers and the phallus; I think sexuality is the mirror of life and not the inverse. Human verticality and the desire of power are in my opinion better justification for vertical buildings.

At the difference of the mounts altitude that has been set once for all by nature, there are no limits for skyscrapers and engineering. You might think you are at the top, but you soon realise that it was only the top of one social group or class, and then new heights are being built every day. Higher standards for wealth and social status are being set, which paradoxically don’t increase the number of people who can see the uninterrupted horizon. In a funny argumentative twist, horizontal space becomes more valuable than vertical space: only matters the uninterrupted horizon you can see from your eyes, not what is below and above you.

I had the idea to incorporate video game elements in the next video after reading Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, and more specifically this quotation:

“A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there’s nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing.”

The video narrative also strangely reminds me the 80s animated series Cocoshaker by Jean-Charles Meunier, except that the next coconut palm is always higher!

“Elevation”

The Welcome to My Place project is launched! Check out the first contributions here and please feel free to add your own videos.

The aim of the project is to encourage people to film the places that matter to them. Workshops will be organised to better understand the meaning of ‘places’ through the usage of videos. Please contact me if you would like to collaborate. I’m looking for artist cartographers, communities, professionals and academics interested in the study of places and their subjective relations.

The video of the Philosophy and Management Pecha Kucha presentation given by Laurent Ledoux at Recyclart is now online.

Find here more details about how the pictures and Polaroids were curated.

Thanks to Jefolo, Chris Jordan, kide, QundL, Benjamin Sandri who generously let us use their photographs and to Nancy L. Stockdale, Thomas van der Vlis and Compton.m who published their Polaroids under a Creative Commons license.

Foreword

What means Progress nowadays? Who defines it? What is our verdict on past and present visions of the future? After having believed in so many utopias, and having been so close to so many dystopias, do we still want to imagine an ideal future? Can we? The Dreams of Progress exhibition intends to introduce the visitor to these questions by screening eleven videos from corporations and artists.

The first set of videos explore some of the utopias envisioned by corporations from the 40s until now. They offer an insight into the social values of their time: efficiency, order, technology, consumerism, knowledge, sustainability and globalisation to list only few of them. In their form, the videos are the natural descendants of utopian visions from authors such as  Thomas More and Aldous Huxley. However, they each offer a unique solution for the future, radically new or in continuity of past ideals.

The second set of videos are by emerging video artists from around the world. Some of artists describe their own vision of the future, others express their perspective on the ambivalent notion of Progress. Rather than reaching a consensus, their videos put forward a wide range of perspectives, from nostalgia to optimism, cynicism to embracement. The videos give a glimpse at how the current Western generation put in perspective ‘Progress’ since their childhood, and how they live it today.

Both sets are distributed on five screens with the intention of exploring the dialogue between the videos. The visitor is asked to make his own judgement on whether what he sees is propaganda lead by self interest, or a genuine proposition for a better future; if the videos advocate ‘Progress’ or instead distance themselves from such beliefs.

The exhibition does not provide any concrete answers, but instead intends to place the ideas of Utopia and Progress at the centre stage of the social debate. The world needs more than ever to meditate on its course, in what some describe as a profound global crisis, economical, environmental and ideological. Utopias and visionaries tend paradoxically to emerge in the least favourable circumstances. For some, they testify on the capacity that has humanity to  choose itself until its most unlikely destiny. For others, they are a chronicle disease.

• Videos part 1: Visions for the future
• Videos part 2: Microsoft productivity vision for 2019
• Videos part 3: Artistic views at the past
• Videos part 4: Discovery of Magnetic North
• Videos part 5: Artistic reactions to Progress

To New Horizons, Handy (Jam) Organization, USA, 1940 – 23 min.

“Definitive document of pre-World War II futuristic utopian thinking, as envisioned by General Motors. Documents the ‘Futurama’ exhibit in GM’s ‘Highways and Horizons’ pavilion at the World’s Fair, which looks ahead to the ‘wonder world of 1960.’”

Century 21 Calling, Fairbanks (Jerry) Productions, 1964 – 14 min.

“Romp through the futuristic landscape of the Seattle World’s Fair, centred in the Bell System pavilion.”

Future of Cities, Squint/opera, UK, 2007 – 4 min.

“The film was commissioned by The Danish Royal Academy of Architecture and is part of a publication outlining the outcome of the International Federation for Housing and Planning Congress that took place in Copenhagen in 2007. ‘Futures of Cities’ is a selection of contributions presented during the congress. These contributions consist of work from miscellaneous architectural practitioners, ten principles developed by ‘Monday Morning’ and competition entries from the student competition that took place as part of the event.”

• Comments on these visions for the future
• Videos part 2: Microsoft productivity vision for 2019

Some Things Won’t Change, Adam Pelling Deeves, UK, 2009 – 3 min.

“Some Things Won’t Change is a remix of Design For Dreaming, set at the 1956 General Motors Motorama. Downloaded from the Internet Archive, it was made in response to Remyyy’s Same Video (http://vimeo.com/remyyy), Different Use game on Vimeo in which a chosen video is reworked by participants. A cutup technique was used in which samples of the original soundtrack were looped along with the accompanying video.”

Fictional recall, Urizen Freaza (Spain) and Misty Woodford (USA), 2008 – 1 min.

“Fictional Recall is a collaborative project based on resurrecting forgotten memories. I purchased a plastic bag full of Super 8 reels for 10€ at the flea market. When screening them I discovered that what I had in my hands was nothing but somebody’s family memories. After the first shock, I began to feel really disgusted by the fact of this memories being sold, rejected or, at least, forgotten. I projected all the footage and cut it in 1 minute length clips which didn’t follow any intention or idea and that I offered to writers to give them a second life.”

Flying, Sam Fuller, USA, 2006 – 2 min.

“Please see the video for description. This video was made for the fun of it. It was shot the April 20th, 2006 on the 31st floor of 200 Water Street. After picking the window lock we filmed 17 takes.”

• Comments on these artistic views at the past
• Videos part 4: Discovery of Magnetic North

Discovery of Magnetic North, Richard Jerousek and Brian Phillips, USA, 2007 – 20 min.

“This video is meant to accompany the live performances of our music project, Discovery of Magnetic North. Much of the music is influenced by the mysterious and bittersweet feelings connected to our earliest memories, most of which have strong ties to the video media that has engulfed us since birth.”

(sadly, the original video is not available anymore on the Internet but here is a taste)

Soundtrack by Discovery of Magnetic North (copyright 2007).
Video material from various Television series, Movies, and Educational Films of the 60s-80s.

Artists: http://www.myspace.com/discoveryofmagneticnorth

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• Comments on the Discovery of Magnetic North video
• Videos part 5: Artistic reactions to Progress

Mardi Gras, Keith Loutit, Australia, 2009 – 3min.

“Mardi Gras is the 7th short film in the 12 month documentary project ‘Little Sydney’.

The idea behind ‘Little Sydney’ is to shrink mankind down to a scale that is more representative of our actual position in the world. By transforming well known locations and daily life, I challenge people to take a second look at places familiar to them and not to take their surroundings for granted.”

McCOOL!!!, Julian Roberts and Namalee Bolle, UK, 2007 – 2 min.

“No.4 in the Relentless Optimism Series entitled McCOOL!!!. Here Namalee Bolle consumes a Super Big Mac. There’s no real script for the Relentless Optimism Series of videos, other than we both wanted to shoot a series of optimistic videos that were  unrehearsed, recorded, edited & released in a single day.”

Tokyo.Future, Ian Lynam, Japan, 2007 – 1 min.

“The video is about a modular, utopian Tokyo of the future. The constant rebuilding and perpetual evolution of the city is displayed, as is a galactic voyage taken by the entire megalopolis. Tokyoites are great travellers (especially in groups), so I imagined that the future denizens of Tokyo would pack up and go sightseeing around the universe together, much like the Tokyoites of the Edo period.”

• Comments on these artistic reactions to Progress
• Back to the Dreams of Progress homepage

This paper documents the curation of the Dreams of Progress exhibition that was held at the Westminster Reference Library in July 2009. The theme of the video art exhibition was Utopia and Progress. It included a philosophical debate and a children’s workshop. It is now available online on the Curated Matter website. The exhibition in its physical form remained confidential but was very well received by its visitors and generated exciting new thoughts on Utopia and Progress. The philosophical debate attracted around 50 people from various backgrounds including professors, philosophical students, art curators and engineers. The children’s workshop introduced the theme of progress to around twenty children. The exhibition and its satellite activities were the results of six months of research and preparation, which is detailed below.

1. Choice of the theme and selection of the videos
2. Relation to the Westminster Reference Library
3. The exhibition space
4. Legends and introduction to the exhibition
5. Philosophical debate
6. Children’s Art Day
7. Online exhibition
8. Federate around the project

Introduction to the exhibition

The theme of Dreams of Progress did not come at once. Initially, I wanted to curate video projects related to optimism. Looking at the videos on the Internet, I felt there was an optimistic movement originating from young American artists. Many of their videos depict a positive and colourful world, made of human contacts and everyday pleasures. It may  be seen as a return to simple things after the an orgy of technology and “Bling-bling”. The movement seemed related to what I imagine being the flower power years. I was interested to understand if this optimism had anything new and unique or if it was just a constant noise that can be witnessed at any time. But I struggled to nail down videos explicitly about optimism. Search terms like ‘optimism’ and ‘happiness’ were not popular on video websites. I still believe the movement exists but it isn’t defined by the artists (at least not yet?). Is it appropriate for a curator to build an exhibition on a theme that none of the artists explicitly address?  Perhaps it is, but I wasn’t willing to go down this road for the exhibition.

When I could find videos explicitly about optimism, I began to wonder, is optimism still relevant nowadays? Are we optimistic today?  What is there to be optimistic about? I considered studying our ideas about dreams for the future, immediate or distant. I found by looking at search keywords like ‘future’ and ‘dream’ that many people are thinking positively about the future,  these people are classified as utopians. The notions remains that no positive future is really possible and positive people are considered unrealistic. I also noticed that many recent videos prefer to look at past visions of the future instead of the ones of today. Some videos question the dreams from previous generations, others are cynical or complacent.

After having navigated through many videos, I defined the final theme of the exhibition (this can be found on the press release). I was ready to curate the videos and began to research within literature. I did not plan to call for submissions as I felt this would impose my own views too heavily on potential artists. As explained in details in the mission statement of the Curated Matter venture, I also wanted to curate videos without knowing who made them in order to not be biased. As a result,  I didn’t know any of the artists before contacting them. They come from many backgrounds and are from around the world.

It became obvious to me very rapidly that I could not curate this exhibition without presenting also videos from corporations. They played a central role in past decades by articulating in images the utopias of their times. Some of the corporate videos have an artistic aspect and it seemed it artificial to reject them because they have been privately founded.

Next: Relation to the Westminster Reference Library