Rear Window > City of Dreadful Night

The City of Dreadful Night

Passagen – Stephen Johnstone and Graham Ellard

18 November – 22 December 1994

Rear Window, Atlantis Lower Gallery, 146 Brick Lane, London E1

Passagen is a photo/sound narrative work, which takes the form of a large-scale multi-screen interactive installation. Utilizing digital technology Passagen opens up an expanded narrative space to trace a series of elliptical pathways through Paris, London, Berlin from the heights of the tourist platforms to the echoing corridors of the underground railway network.

Taking as its starting point Walter Benjamin’s use of the metaphor of panoramic vision and the labyrinth in his unfinished Arcades Project, (The Passagen Werk), Passagen asks the viewers to follow a choice of slowly unwinding narrative threads that begin with the ecstasy of aerial vision and end with the sacrifice of underground travel. Similarly following Benjamin’s example, in mixing an interest in new forms of visual technology with an enthusiasm for obsolescent forms of visual pleasure, Passagen fuses the pre-cinematic spectacle of the panorama with the post-photographic technology of digital media.

Passagen is presented as part of Rear Window’s exhibition, The City of Dreadful Night at Atlantis, Brick Lane, London. The exhibition coincides with the presentation of the CD-ROM edition of Passagen at the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of Revue Virtuelle 12; the Hypermédias; 9 November – 23 January, 1995. Publication of this CD-ROM edition by Film and Video Umbrella is planned for early 1995.

Passagen was originally commissioned jointly by Steven Bode at Film and Video Umbrella, London and John Mount, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, to form part of the National Photography Conference in October 1993. The commission was supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain.

This original piece was subsequently developed and presented as part of V-Topia; visions of a virtual world, at Tramway, Glasgow during July-September 1994.