A Day Under The City (in collaboration with Franz Buchholtz) color/sound 48:58 (1999)
Analog Futures: The Enduring Resonance of A Day Under The City
In an era dominated by pristine digital formats, A Day Under The City gains new relevance as both a historical artifact and a sensory experience. Nearly thirty years after its creation, the work invites reflection on the materiality of analog video and its unique capacity to capture the friction between technological progress and evolving human environments.
In the tradition of self-reflexive experimental cinema, recalling Man with a Movie Camera’s kinetic portrait of urban life, A Day Under The City examines a slice of its own moment, that of the post-industrial Midwest of the late 1990s. Its technicolor reflections of Milwaukee’s decaying infrastructure evoke the underground reinterpretation of industrial space that defined the city’s illegal rave scene, where obsolete warehouses became sites of vibrant new culture within the urban ruin.
Set to a pulsating electronic score by Signaldrift, the piece functions as a technicolor elegy to the death of analog media, a meditation on impermanence, degeneration, transformation, and renewal. The degradation of image and sound becomes both aesthetic strategy and metaphor, reflecting a city, and a media epoch, in flux. In its analog motion glitches and simulated dissolving pixels, the work unexpectedly anticipates the digital decay to come, foreshadowing a new era of technological imperfection beneath the illusion of progress.As digital culture becomes ever more seamless, A Day Under The City endures as a tactile reminder of the value of imperfection, decay, and material engagement in understanding the human dimensions of technological change.
To register a 30th Anniversary Screening of A Day Under The City fill out the form at this link.
Brandon Bauer 