MEMORIES OF A TOWN An Augmented Reality Installation (ARTISTS STATEMENT)
Cinema is the memory of the lives we haven’t lived. Like amnesiacs in search of lost memories, we watch lives we might have lived, loves we might have loved.
Like a pill combating Alzheimer, Cinema projects in our minds other people’s lives, romances and sorrows. The physical places where these events take place hold and contain those memories. The ultimate Cinematic Place we have all lived is New York. The idea of New York is not in the US. It is a town seen by everyone, everywhere. It is in every country, every city, in every room of every house of the World. We all dream ourselves American.
We share memories of apartments in the east village where we have never lived, the smell of midtown hotdogs we have never eaten. We are familiar with the anarchic energy of its streets. We recall kisses, stolen in the shadows under the Brooklyn Bridge.
We share our nostalgia for a town we’ve never been in. We all remember it because, as with memories, this New York does not exist in time. Cinema split New York in half, divided it in two. The memories of Cinematic New York do not belong anymore to that town, nor to this World. This place exists on a different plane of reality.
Like a rake in a sand garden, Cinema collects memories and drags them together to form reality.
As artists, we remember New York. We remember through memories that don’t belong to us. Our aim is to recreate the Virtual Network of a collective, shared memory of a timeless place. We recreated a piece of this phantasmagorical Network of Lives weaved together. It is without end.
This Memory-Net is made of some of our dearest memories of movies. These are our gigantic skyscraper-climbing apes, black and white boxing matches Our Central Park, our condo with a breathtaking view of Manhattan. Memories of a crazy escape involving a yellow taxicab, a woman and a man in a trench coat.
Ask yourselves this: If movie New York exists in all our minds, it is reasonable to assume we also exist somewhere in the crowded streets of this Invisible City.
BY:
Tara Khalili
David Balazs Beleznay
Ferdinando Dell’Omo
Mehran Jabbari
Looking forward to seeing it!