The new Munich suburb Messestadt Riem is still taking shape. People and businesses have moved into the first thousand homes and offices, and most streets, along with a large park, have been laid out. The shopping centre with its restaurants, however, is still being built..
re:site projects has installed two digital cameras in this ad hoc landscape of construction sites, urban bustle, gravel pits and boisterous play areas. The video streams from these cameras can be accessed at www.resiteprojects.de or viewed via a projection at the U-Bahn station Messestadt West and on monitors set up in the streets. The video pictures are combined automatically with a large number of movie clips and texts, generating a complex collage of fleeting snapshots of the present and timeless images from the past.
re:site projects seeks to present life in the manner of a film narrative. In our society it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fiction: we perceive the world in terms of cultural memory, determined to a large extent by movies and TV. At the same time, re:site projects attempts to address and document physical and social change in Messestadt, offering residents and visitors a rare opportunity to produce their own commentaries and create their own images.
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The two cameras are located at the north-west exit of the U-Bahn station Messestadt West (1) and between the Grünwerkstatt and the Quax youth and cultural centre on Helsinki-Promenade (2). The cameras’ areas of vision are marked on the ground, and the images from them are transmitted day and night. Short movie or video sequences interrupt each of the two video streams at varying intervals. .
In form and content the movie and video clips, saved in a digital database, resemble the live pictures from Messestadt and are coded in terms of a series of opposites: day/night, for example, or moving/static, one person/several people. Automatic analysis of the degree of movement in, and the brightness of, the camera images enables those movie and video clips to be selected for interspersion which correspond closest in terms of motif and action to the pictures being transmitted via the cameras.
Along with clips from well-known and less familiar films, the digital picture archive contains video sequences produced in the course of workshops conducted with young people from Messestadt.
Anyone can comment on the images or chat with other users via www.resiteprojects.de. The text of these communications appears beneath the video screens. All the texts are saved in a database and can be accessed via the archive page of the website. These interactively generated texts are automatically interspersed with dialogue from the movie clips.
The constantly changing collage of live pictures from Messestadt, movie and video clips and individual text contributions can be viewed here on the Live Video/Text page. In Messestadt itself the videos and texts can be seen on the monitors of the camera box (1) and in the projections on the platform of the U-Bahn station Messestadt West (3).
screenshots clips
Contact:
info@resiteprojects.de
Links:
Felix S. Huber
www.fshuber@web.de
Florian Wüst
www.thing.net/~florian
skytalk
A media art project by Felix S. Huber and Florian Wüst in collaboration with Udo Noll, wind turbine generator Garbsen-Schloss Ricklingen
www.skytalk.org
re:site projects was realized with the support of:
M"net - Telekommunikation für München und Bayern
www.m-net.de
SynergyOnline
www.synergyonline.de
Quax - Zentrum für Freizeit und kulturelle Bildung - Messestadt Riem
www.echo-ev.de
We would like to cordially thank:
Claudia Büttner, Christina Kaufmann, Sandra Thiedig - M-net: Stefan Straßberger, Ulrike Saur - SynergyOnline: Stefan Tübinger, Eva Neider - Quax / Echo e.V.: Karl-Michael Brand, Leo Bachmann, Verena Fink - Axis Communications: Dagmar Bauer - Regierung von Oberbayern: Georg Funk - Baureferat, Abteilung U-Bahnbau: Paul Kramer, Karl Hefner, Burkhard Schäffer - Münchner Verkehrsgesellschaft / Stadtwerke: Gerhard Neumair , Leonard Dankerl, Ludwig Geier, Johann Jurasek - Baureferat, Abteilung Gartenbau: Dr. Ulrich Schneider, Ingeborg Popp, Wolfgang Friedl - Baureferat, Abteilung Sondernutzung: Christina Völker, Walter Sinseder, Johann Georg Sandmeier - GEWOFAG: Herr Reiter - Marco Balgo (echtraum Möbelschlosserei), Günter Beutel (Antennenbau und Service GmbH), Herr Riebl (Leonhard Moll, Hoch- und Tiefbau GmbH), Michael Lang (Lang Audio & Medientechnik), Anton Dutz, Helmut Lipski (Münchener Gesellschaft für Stadtmöblierung), Anja Casser, Ingeborg Wüst, Andreas Gegner, Galerie Michael Zink
Photographs by Edward Beierle, Munich
Projection at the U-Bahn station Messestadt West (3)
Map
Cameras (1) and (2)
Area of vision Camera (1)
Area of vision Camera (2)
Opening on April 23rd, 2002