Uniformity/Diversity – Things out of place

Taken out of context
Laura Jatkowski

Polluting agents in our everyday
Text excerpts from Zygmunt Bauman

Out of place, polluting agents without an assigned place.
Will cross boundaries whether invited or not.

There is no way of thinking of purity without thinking of 'order', without assigning to things their 'rightful' 'proper' places which happen to be such places as they would not fill naturally.

Reverse shot
Chris Coy - Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Place and context
Yvonne Droge Wendel

Manipulation
Tyler Vigen – Spurious Correlations

Tropical Islands
"artificial exotic island environment"

“People or families who can’t afford to travel to the tropics should have the chance to spend some time in a tropical atmosphere,”

The Angel of History
Hito Steyerl

We can find an example of a space of reproduction in the image of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) inflated and replicated on a giant balloon inside an artificial entertainment world called Tropical Islands close to Berlin. This structure used to be a factory space for huge zeppelins, when it was still believed that this specific post-socialist region in the former GDR could be economically defillibrated and somehow industrially reanimated. When the enterprise went bust, a Malaysian investor transformed it into a multiexotic spa landscape, complete with replicas of rainforests, jacuzzi look-alikes of Mayan sacrificial pits, as well as giant photoshopped infinity-horizon wallpapers. It is cut-andpaste territory, jumbled, airbrushed, dragged and dropped in 3-D—quintessential bubble architecture with a stunning number of inflatable elements. Why does this site embody the basic tensions of the age of reproduction? It literally transformed from a space of industrial production to a space of postproduction, showing the aftereffects of production, so to speak. This space is not produced, but Hito Steyerl reproduced. There is no final cut but ever-morphing edits, hard cuts, and blurred transitions between different chunks of contained exoticas. And Klee’s Angelus Novus is no longer dragged away toward a future horizon as it surveys historical catastrophe. The lateral movement is gone, and with it a movement toward a future. Gone are horizon and linear perspective. Instead, the angel shuttles up and down like an elevator on patrol. It looks down on a paradise without sin and without history, in which the future has been replaced by the promise of temporary upward mobility. The horizon loops. An angel becomes drone; divine violence divested into killing time.

Re-use / in-side out

Epcot
Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow

Future World and World Showcase

Celebration, Florida

Reverse shot
Mass Ornament – Natalie Bookchin

Sigfried Kracauer

‘The mass is forced to contemplate itself (mass meetings, mass demonstrations). The mass is always present to itself and often in the aesthetically seductive form of an ornament or an emotionally moving image.’ Second, ‘with the help of the wireless the living room becomes a public place’.