Guarding the Turbulent Land
Hansel & Gretel is the latest work in the complex and exceptionally fruitful collaboration between Pritzker Prize winning Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (architects for the Armory’s renovation) and the Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei. Having worked together for fifteen years in the field of art and architecture, never defining their roles and thus creating unexpected results, they have collaborated on projects such as the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008 and the 2012 pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London. Hansel & Gretel brings together their combined interests in the psychological impact of architecture and the politics of public space; creating a playful, strange and eventually eerie environment with different layers of reality revealed to the visitors first in the Drill Hall and then in the Head House of the Park Armory.
The initial impulse for the project was to transform the vast Thompson Drill Hall into a public park, a place of free movement and play, open 24 hours and accessible from street level. Hansel & Gretel is, however, quite the opposite, a dystopian forest of projected light where the floor rises up, as if lifted by an invisible force, and visitors are tracked by infrared cameras and surveyed by overhead drones as they systematically capture the parkgoers’ data and movements. Here the breadcrumbs of the famous Hansel and Gretel fairy tale are not eaten by birds but rather digital crumbs are gathered and stored, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury’s poignant, 1953 science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, where an omniscient state surveils its citizens from the skies.
EXISDANCE
Something special here …
Project from P.I.C.S. Tokyo is a performance featuring realtime projection mapping onto a moving dancer - absolutely no post-production, what you see in the video was captured as is:
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