Amusement parks: one blissful aspect of modern metropolis.
A two-way reading of illusory and urban.
DETAILED STUDY AND DOCUMENTATION OF A TOPIC
supervised by P. Tournikiotis_in collaboration with D. Gelagoti
supervised by P. Tournikiotis_in collaboration with D. Gelagoti
“Prudencia” city consists of two half cities. In the one there are the big rollercoaster with its steep hunches, the maypole with the radiate chains, the wheel with the spinning cages, the wall of death with the motor bikers head-down, the circus dome with the acrobats hanging like grapes by their ropes. The other half city is from stone and marble and concrete, with the bank, the factories, the slaughterhouse, the school etc. The one of the two half cities is the stable one, the other is the temporary and, when the waiting time is over, they unwound it, they disassemble it and they take it, to transplant it in the undefined land of another half city.” (I. Calvino, The Invisible Cities, 2004)
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The amusement park is nothing but an industry that manufactures entertainment. At the same time It is a spectacle constructed with conditions close to the ones applied to the urban condition. The reason why amusement parks became so popular is definitely found in the reasons that led to their invention. Here, the suppressed instincts of the cities become part of theme rides, the human desires mature without a guilt, with the pretext of the surreal, while the fears are translated in fascinating experiences. And something more than this. By functioning as a city-, nature-, society miniature, it transforms the experiences in a consumer product and hence seems to answer a more transcendental social demand: “by consuming the spectacle, an object of memory is consumed and thus, the experience of a different life”. In this sense, the amusement park is the realization of a utopia. |
Athensland or how the metropolis would be like if viewed as a theme park ride
For Athens, we become that criticizing eye, which indicates a new way to perceive the city and explains the reason why every human action and image is part of an unconscious symphony of amusing moments. For this experiment, we use loans from the amusement park. Regarding the meaning of the ride as substantial and using tools like speed, shrinking, the fragment -spectacle- symbol, which in the amusement park are all proved to operate very drastically to the changes of emotions, we try such a kind of study to our city, while accepting the fact that every urban spectacle that we project, has to do with our own personal experience. Having as a criterion the real-life relations that they symbolize, we chose the areas that are going to compose the spectacles for our surrealistic park, emphasizing the sensation that they give us and putting aside their function, exactly like what happens in the amusement parks. We also borrowed the tool of speed to bridge the gaps between moments. Those gaps are not just geographic. They travel in time; in the current one and the one recorded as history. In our park, the ride between the exhibits flows like the flow of thought. In Athens I live now and I live three centuries ago, and also I live in “now” and in the hour before and after “now”. With the same manner that time is surpassed in the archways with the juxtaposition of objects from different ages, in the travels of our memories and the funfairs. With the speed of light. And in the same time the sizes of things change, they grow and shrink, they condense and dilate according to the place they occupy in our conscience. Or maybe with a reverse procedure we are the ones who grow and shrink, like another Alice in Wonderland. So, like the amusement parks can wisely become eloquent portrayals of human psychogeography by using the tools at will, we want to experiment, too, with the city, by placing it in the machine that transforms emotions to spectacles: so that it comes out of there distorted, enlarged, mutilated but brilliant, anyhow. |