East Beijing Road
13min09sec
By using various forms of technology, including photogrammetry, 3D modeling, 16mm film, Super 8 film, and AI, this video reimagines the stories of a building with a history spanning over 100 years in Shanghai, China. All residents of this building were compelled to move out due to an ongoing gentrification policy. By reconstructing the 3D photogrammetry models collected from this building, a synthetic space is formed by layering sources from different places and time periods, such as archival photos taken in the 1940s in Shanghai from the LIFE Photo Collection, music from Spring in a Small Town (1948), interviews with elderly residents who had lived in this building for more than half a century, and a dance shot on Super 8 film on the terrace of the building before all residents moved out. By capturing the reconstructed 3D space with a Bolex camera and hand-processing the films, the colorful computer-rendered scenes are transformed into black-and-white footage. The contaminated and scratched 16mm footage from the hand-processing is then fed into an AI algorithm to regenerate new moving images.
This process of transformation—from physical site to digital rendering, and then reimagined with computational algorithms—retraces and remediates this disappeared building. The stories of past residents, along with reimagined stories collected from archives and reenactments, hover around the digital environment. The ambiguity of time and space in this project raises questions about the perception of time, the flux of archives, and the meaning of ruins. This project is about loss and memory, yet it is not about melancholy. It reconsiders our relationship with the past through the remediation of technologies. Old and new, digital and analog, real and fictional, virtual and physical, and human and non-human elements interweave. East Beijing Road questions the visibility and invisibility of the past. The process of making it is like a palimpsest, constantly constructing and deconstructing the past with imaginations between human and machine.