Kinetoscopic City: A Spatial Archival Recollection of an Urban Spectacle As an Immersive Cinematic Bi-location

This creative research thesis approaches Fort Lane and its relative precinct as an invitation to reimagine, remap and rewrite the city as a kinetoscope2 arcade. Here, as a precursor to contemporary cinema, offered a new form of urban spectacle, a series of contraptions which housed miniature looped moving image sequences, which amazed and captured the attention of spectators. Reflections on these archival narratives of the site, have been intersected and traversed by my own wandering and psycho exploitation of the lane. It is a “spectacular theatric”3 of archival image that activated a haptic simulation of recollection. This research project asks how the transposition and curation of an archival collection, coupled with an intimate psychogeographical inquiry into an urban site, might contribute to a new form of site-reading? A space often idle-ised4 by the wanderer, Fort lane itself is a rich space cloaking a plethora of tales and spirits just waiting to be picked at and recalled, reminisced and related. Through Historiography, which underpins this inquiry, is essentially a curiosity which hones in on the contexts of an event to discern and explore the contrasts of time and place, this inquiry not only limits our self to the actualities and expositions of the past but also consults the phenomenon and eagerness of today. Re-writing a lesser known historical narrative as a spatial designer, abandons more accustomed methods of consecration or inscription. Therefore, proposing to place the spectator in a temporal immediacy, offering a new perception of historical anecdotes. Reimagining Fort Lane as a site, a stage, a fantastical narrative.

Author

• Wimalaratne, Shawn

• Kinetescope
• Spatial design
• Film
• Sound
• Moving image
• Archive
• History
• Urban

Identifier

hdl:10292/12638

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:openrepository.aut.ac.nz:10292/12638