Metropol

"Metropol" is an audiovisual lament born out of rage at the city as a mechanism of control and hope for the other, parallel city we its inhabitants shape. As a live piece it uses a mix of hand-modeled digital environments and spatial data structures to depict an urban purgatory of concrete, networks, and shadow. Cycles of construction and deconstruction, technologies of access and surveillance, and the urban fallout of contemporary warfare and apartheid are explored through techniques like geometry moshing, generative text, and camera movements emulating drones and CCTV. Set to the upcoming experimental album "Peace Is Over" by Sally Max, to be performed in part live, the piece uses audioreactivity to manifest the artists' agency over their built environment.

In the metropolis, walls both physically and socially constructed confine our movements while technologies of surveillance ensure the rules of access are obeyed, all laundered through a narrative of progress and convenience.

While the piece is still in production, these images and video -- featuring an excerpt from the unreleased track "Behind Dark Concrete Walls" by Sally Max -- will serve as an example of the style and theme.

We love and grieve in the city laid out by master planners indifferent to the dramas of our lives. We are left homeless in the name of tax benefits for barons of industry, or when the whims of statecraft send bombs through our roofs. Yet the city in all its propagandistic glory is only alive because of us. In our absence, the city is an empty cage.

This work contemplates the dissonance between the city as home and the city as real estate, the paradox of vandalism in a city plastered with advertisements, and the reclamation of physical space from the institutions that forged them. It is about the love-out-of-captivity that is life in the metropolis.

In the context of the theme "Attention, please!" we explore attention as a commodity in urban environments, both in the form of mass advertising (where we are the subject), and in the form of surveillance (where we are the object). And at a more basic level, this piece is a call for political and emotional engagement of the audience, a plea to notice and rebel against the hostile city.