Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Films allow us to see our cities, in this case Hong Kong, as something more than canyons of concrete, glass and steel. This paper explores animated photogrammetry as a relevant tool for recording urban leftovers. This approach sees film making as an activity, and thereby sits between the common understanding of Everyday Urbanism as a concept of ‘fragmentation and incompleteness’ and Messy Urbanism as being ‘hidden, disgraced, [and] under-appreciated.’ Furthermore, this paper gives an overview to related approaches, such as Thomassons, in order to distinguish a unique intermedia methodology. In short, Thomassons is a term and method invented by conceptual artist Genpei Agasegawa, a founding member of the street observation society about objects being ‘too place-specific to be abstracted, too plainly useless to be commodified, too absurd to be preserved.’ All this is in contrast to the ‘carefully planned, officially designated, and often underused spaces of public use,’ and thereby sheds light to incidents – things that were left behind; forgotten, overlooked, neglected, relativised as the ‘background noise’ of urban living. Yet, here they are made visible by films for a ‘sensitivity about the city.’ In relation to the object’s complex temporality, this research tries to give contours to remnants that are in a state of uncertainty. It’s a paradox: to capture remains; Or is it even more: to cherish them, so that something can disappear?