Site-Specific Video Tour
The video tour Halle 87 – City Halle – Haus Tista-Murk is a sensual journey through the ZHAW University Library in Winterthur. Inside the library you can borrow a tablet with headphones and follow the pre-recorded video. Based on this video tour, one is guided through the library and experiences it as a real as well as a virtual journey through the library. Being present in the same place where the video tour footage was shot, reality and fiction, past, present and future overlap and merge. (Hard to explain).
5′ clip of the 35 minute piece
Video Tour, 35′ (Full length)
Speech at the vernissage of the video tour at the ZHAW HSB Winterthur
03.12.2015
By Doris Gassert:
In this site-specific video tour created for the University Library, the two separate working environments and identities, otherwise clearly separated by name, are intertwined for the first time. A clear artistic intention – and a very contemporary reflection – is thus superimposed on the building, its history and its transformation. And this is what Marc Lee’s work has always been about.
‘How is the digital world developing?’ asks the female voice that will guide us through the video and the university library. It is a thoughtful voice. Her task will be to show us the way on the one hand, and on the other to always place the stories of this place in the larger perspective. ‘Our social structures, behaviours and needs will certainly continue to be strongly influenced by this [i.e. the digital world] in the future. Do we still need libraries in the age of the internet?’ she asks.
In particular, the video tour shows us that information and knowledge transfer today takes place in many, sometimes virtual, places – and via a variety of media channels. Nevertheless, even in an increasingly digital world, physical locations are indispensable – at least for our generations.
What is much more profound in this change – and the video walk allows us to experience this very consciously – is that we increasingly encounter places and people through an overlap or fusion of virtual and real spaces of experience, i.e. we move simultaneously in online and offline worlds. With the smartphone, there is no longer a strict separation, and this has long had an impact on the physical places themselves and on the way people meet – with far-reaching consequences for our entire way of life and interpersonal interactions. Because these are undergoing profound changes in the digital world.
In this way, the ‘here and now’ is increasingly transformed into an experience in which disparate things simultaneously and dynamically collide and intermingle: past, present and future, historical facts and personal memories, different media formats, forms of presentation and perspectives; real and virtual worlds – the video presents all these components and synthesises them into a sensory experience. But that’s not all: it also draws us into this synthesis. Because the tour only unfolds its full effect in the performance, i.e. only when we get involved with the video – here, on site, in this building.
Through montaged recordings, we are then transported from the experiential space of today’s university library back to other, bygone times in this former Sulzer building 87, which we can experience through sounds, photographs and stories by Jürg Hablützel. The tour takes us not only through the place, but also through its historical transformation – the aura of the past becomes tangible as a present presence that lurks in every room and every corner of these halls.
The intercut film sequences from Germaine Dulac’s Themes et Variations from the 1920s and their resumption in the contemporary dance interpretations of space, which break up the tour, show not least that experience and knowledge are not only manifested in books and stories, but are also transported via spatial arrangements, specific forms of expression, gestures and gazes. All of this always feeds our reflections, projections and future plans – YOUR DREAM, YOUR PLACE. The only constant here is change – and what better way to make this tangible and experienceable than through art?