Everytown

video animation, digital prints
2006 - 2007

The point of departure is the imagination and artistic treatment of science fiction during the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the 1920s and 1930s in literature and film; the focus is placed on social structures and their respective staging, especially in models of architecture. Claudia Larcher explores to what extent the visions of the future imagined then coincide with today's present. By analyzing film material, drawings and sketches, she distills certain characteristics from the period's visions of future architecture, public transportation, energy generation, and political systems, which she then transfers via photographs to a retro-fictional video animations. Several of these photographs, which are use as modular components of a larger collage form, were created in Vienna, so that they seem familiar to viewers who live here, but in the new context alien and thanks to the shift in perspective, bizarre. The meta-spaces constructed in such a way are non-places in Marc Augé's sense, transitory scenes, plateaus of transition, desolate urban deserts, cold uninhabitable like the dark side of the moon.