tagged w/ The Standard Hotel
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Guests of the newly-opened Standard Hotel in New York will get a view of heaven when they ascend the elevator to their rooms and a glimpse of hell on the way back down to street level thanks to Marco Brambilla.
After seeing the director and video artist's work in a gallery last year, boutique hotelier Andre Balazs asked him to create a permanent installation to be displayed on high-definition monitors in the Standard's elevators.
Brambilla responded by creating Civilization, a video mural based on Dante's Divine Comedy that scrolls in synch with the movement of the 18-storey hotel's elevators. "The idea of doing a ‘video mural' had interested me for quite some time and the journey from hell to heaven depicted in this way seemed to be a good fit," he said in a statement about the work.
Produced by Toronto-based Crush, Civilization is comprised of 400 individual channels of looped clips: obscure film and stock footage, Hollywood movie moments and original CG imagery. Brambilla (who is repped for commercials by The Ebeling Group) spent three months researching and cataloguing footage before spending six weeks - working mostly at night - pasting together painterly collages in Flame and ordering them into a narrative journey: hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven, upper heaven and back to lower hell.Guests of the newly-opened Standard Hotel in New York will get a view of heaven when... more
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Riding in a hotel elevator has just become much more daring if you visit the Standard Hotel in New York City, because the Standard Hotel’s elevator is now making all local stops to Hell!! “Civilization” is a piece of video artwork created by artist Marco Brambilla for the hotel’s elevators, which gives the effect of either ascending to heaven or descending to hell, depending on which floor you’re headed to. “Civilization” was inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and combines looped footage from over 400 different sources. The short film plays on a high-definition monitor which is observed through a viewing port in each of the hotel’s elevators and moves according to the direction of the elevator.
This piece includes a number of colorful photographs, as well as the video installation, “Civilization.”Riding in a hotel elevator has just become much more daring if you visit the Standard... more
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