THE PAST HAS NO FUTURE – INVESTIGATIONS INTO RETRO FUTURISM

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Living in Singapore feels like being in the future which I imagined in my childhood: On the one hand technical conveniences like automated border control, contactless payments, driverless trains, a nearly frictionless organization to facilitate the daily live. Accordingly, the urban structures of huge housing blocks, stacked train tracks on multiple levels, entwined with footbridges, roads and bike paths provide an impression of how the future was anticipated to look like in the last century.

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This future, which was promised to me in the canon of the Western cinematic mythology, looks and feels exactly like many of those Science-Fiction-movies rolled into one, like »Star Wars« and »Blade Runner«, like »Star Trek« and »Alien«, like »2001« and »Matrix« simultaneously, and fills me with awe – amazement and fear at the same time.

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As there is no room for old or rotten parts in the world of tomorrow, several buildings or certain details of the urban landscape might disappear soon, while they were at some point ahead of their time – or still bear the aesthetics of some futuristic vision from the last century.

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Specifically, with the recent announcement of demolitions, I anticipate most of the architectural idiosyncrasies of the Singaporean style will be gone soon and the »Tropical Brutalism« will only remain as a part of our imagination. That I wish to defy. I am currently capturing the structures with my cameras and research into the background history of the constructions but also the foresight of visions of urban planning.

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With the current desire to capture and share everything, the abundance of pictures render the individual image irrelevant. Therefore, in addition to an experimental video setup, to be shown in stereoscopic splendour, in which the presentation depends on definite conditions, major images from the series will be printed with specific techniques.