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16 / 11 / 02 – 15 / 12 / 02
Exhibition / Films / Talks / Performance
Coming Attraction
X Characters in Search of an Author (2002)
Constanze Ruhm (A)
Endnotes:
(3) Movie Ride
In the synergetic 1980s, a direct corporate Hollywood spin-off was the development of the ”movie ride.” A ride is understood to be condensation, compression and foreshortening of the film economy in the form of an extended Special Effect, a program that translates cinema's intense subjective experiences into distinct consumer formats. A movie ride produces a special kind of visual and acoustic architecture, and is based on the grammar of consumer models of representation. It restages and reruns the visual experience of the original film, but is also grounded on the notion of continuous movement, sound effect, and an intensified sense of artificiality.
It operates only through the symbolic, unmediated by language, condensing a dreamlike experience in which the subject is overwhelmed by vision. In this condensation, the ride re-enacts the movie as oneric experience. It foregoes all actors, taking the main film sets and the film’s underlying mechanics to turn them not just into characters, but into stars – the set and the script become the attraction, a characterless psyche belonging to no one but the cinematic apparatus.
With its essential focus on sensation and spectacle of motion, the ride suggests a kind of inverse movement back to the future by returning to essentially pre-institutionalized syntax forms of early cinema. It embarks on a skewed history of cinema, and travels alongside spectacular scenes, through fields of orientations and special effects, always in relation to contemporary philosophies of consumer navigators and open source networks. Here, cinema is revealed to still be an assemblage of agencies and effects, narratives, and scripting devices that is measured in degrees ranging from experience to immersion.
The economy of a ride condenses cinema to the essence of postmodern desires. A ride does not convey a sense of fulfillment or release, but a feeling of anticipation. It is a trip that structures along a temporal as well as spatial iconography of media fiction. As a last form of contemporary longing, it speaks of an oddly inverted passion for the real. It orientates along a path that separates "writing" from "riding," illusion from hallucination. Thus, the ride is a passage linking cinematic to psychic apparatus.
SCRIPT
RIDE
MEMORY
CHARACTER
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