Place - Urbanity

Place urbanity
video/webm
640 × 480
03:09

Gesamtansicht der Installation Place Urbanity
image/jpeg
440 × 330

Place Urbanity
image/jpeg
1280 × 960

Place Urbanity
image/jpeg
1280 × 960

Place Urbanity
image/jpeg
1280 × 960

Place Urbanity
image/jpeg
1280 × 138

Melbourne is a notably multicultural city because of the size and diversity of its many immigrant communities. Melbourne also has the reputation of being the comedy capital of Australia. PLACE ‚ URBANITY presents fifteen fully panoramic video recordings of various urban locations in Melbourne that each identify the districts of a specific immigrant and/or ethnic community: Chinese, Macedonian, Greek, Italian, Vietnamese, Turkish, Russian, Jewish, Aboriginal, African, Serbian, Indian, Australian, Egyptian and Lebanese.

The installation allows the viewer to rotate a projected image within a fully surrounding 9m diameter projection screen. A virtual pscyho-geographic reconstruction of the Melbourne urban landscape presents the fifteen panoramic recordings within a series of architectonic cylinders on whose interior walls these videos are viewable. When exploring each of the panoramic scenes the visitor will find a comedian, hanging upside down, who when coming into view will tell a joke. Each comedian is a member of the particular ethnic community represented in their panorama surroundings, and their jokes reflect critically and humorously their distinctive identities within the Australian social and geographical context.