Photo series / Location research - UT, AZ, NM, OR, CA 2011 - as part of the project ‘scale - scape - scope’, within MAK Schindler Scholarship / Artists and Architects-in-Residence Program - Los Angeles

- MAK Museum of Applied Arts Vienna & MAK Center at Schindler House - Los Angeles


Photos, Location Research  Gregor Holzinger Project Collaboration with  Florian Schafschetzy, Eva Sommeregger 
Many thanks to  Matthew Coolidge and Aurora Tang
at CLUI Center for Land Use Interpretation Los Angeles


"A Street-View of Selected Points of no/alternative Interest(-s)"
A project dealing with the theme of 'infrastructural desertification' as an apocryphal phenomenon, projecting current subtle developments into a dystopian future [ref. to "desert" in a sense of "uninhabited/inhospitable area"/'Einöde'].


Related Videos / Project Documentary
Location Research

THEMATIC BACKGROUND

Today´s metropolis´ consist to a large extent of infrastructural landscapes, dedicated solitarily to facilitate maneuverability of themselves: freeway interchanges as big as city centers, endless arrays of street grids serving an abundance of suburban one-family homes, junctions of belt-roads with the unevitable shopping center and their deserts of parking lots, and further out: satellitic infrastructural landscapes serving the urban areas like extensive solar power plants, railroad changing yards, reservoirs and aqueducts, oil fields, farmlands - vast urban areas deserted by mono-structural use, i.e. an artificial or synthetic kind of desertification is taking place. On the forefront of urban development, infrastructure is covering up natural spaces in a large scale, but sometimes – due to economic changes – is never put to use, leaving behind 'infrastructural deserts' like
- Rio Vista, a kind of ‘brand-new ghost town’ and failed exuburban housing development where streets, sewers, and signage are all in place - but without any buildings, or
- California City, a vast area in the Mohave desert, gridded out with named and numbered streets, running through the desert for miles, but not inhabited.

As a result new hybrid forms of landscape(-s) between natural/sub-natural and artificial/infrastructural are evolving – infrastructural deserts slowly reclaimed by the nature of urban peripheries.

Projecting this development into a near future and assuming an exponential growth of this highly over-developed, absurdly self-sustaining infrastructural areas, these are the places the video installation is referring to: The viewer is set into an archeology of infrastructural deserts, seen through the perceptive apparatus they were built for – the car - as a not yet out-dating metaphor and athmospheric remainder of the highly individualistic lifestyle of the future metropolis.