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While en route from Calcutta to Frankfurt during the night of the 19th to 20th of July 2000, I ended up on a five-hour layover at Dubai airport. With my Panasonic DV camcorder I started recording stills of the airport. A year later, I finished and exhibited the resulting video – Nontope / Ontope (Angels in the Architecture).
To make the average short stay at an international airport as comfortable as possible, the terminal buildings more or less contain all the facilities to satisfy your needs and requirements – within the constraints of your transient state, and the operational demands of the airport.
On the odd occasion when you spend a longer time at an airport, the strangeness of this ‘habitat-simulation’ becomes more and more apparent.
As the hours roll by, your ‘in-transit’ persona begins to change, and your needs start expanding beyond urinating, eating, buying reading matter for the trip, or gifts for those, somewhere, awaiting your arrival. You become aware that you are starting to transgress the simulated, functional identity assigned to you as ‘person-in-transit’ – on some flowchart somewhere… and you start realising what a non-place this is. You sense that ‘Place’ means more than locus, for this lacks the ontological dimension of human existence – measured in an individual’s hours, days, and years. Statistically, the building is constantly occupied by humans – but no single person dwells long enough to leave a mark – and the building stays forever the functional shell that the architects, engineers and planners envisaged.
But strangely, this place creates a sort of meditational consciousness – maybe because you’re bored and tired – in an in-between time with no specific agenda. You begin noticing all the objects – animate and inanimate – which populate this shell.
On the one hand, they look as uncanny and distant as they’ve ever appeared – you sense that every thing around you, is just a ‘stand-in’ – an incarnation – of some item, or function, in an airport simulation.
Yet, on the other hand, you become aware that every thing – including yourself – shares the same statistical, functional existence within the system – and thus the trolleys, the utility carts, the elevators, the seats, the signs and the people, appear almost like long-lost friends – comrades – like angels in the architecture – and this place becomes a place of undifferentiated being.
In 2023, I decided to remaster the original video in Ultra-HD. Scaling an image measuring 768 x 576 pixels to 2880 x 2160 pixels is actually a ludicrous undertaking. The interlaced, blurred, noisy and extremely compressed original images added to the challenge.
I decided to ‘abuse’ AI image-processing software to scale, de-noise, and sharpen the images. The resulting, uncanny images had very little to do with the originals, yet I found the artefacts – or look – created by the process very stimulating, and in a sense very sympathetic to my original creative intentions.
Inspired by these ‘newfound’, ‘newborn’ images – including out-takes from the original shoot – I slightly re-edited the video by replacing four shots. In addition, I did a remaster of the original stereo soundtrack.
For this reason, I have renamed this video as it is a ‘remix’ of the original.