Film Commissions:
City’s New Malls
Film Commissions: City’s New Malls
City’s New Malls by Kim Munro
In 2011, Burnside Shopping Village in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide completed its upgrade and opened to the public. At the centre of the mall was a 100-year-old protected river red gum that couldn’t be removed. Attempts were made to keep the tree alive, first by providing a canopy of windows, and later through misting sprays and nutrient injections. Within two years, the tree was dead. Perhaps as a final act of resistance, the tree simply refused to be assimilated. Everyone I meet in Adelaide knows this story. It is folklore. But the battle between the built environment and these giant trees in Adelaide continues. While documentary does past tense very well, and present tense okay, it struggles with future tense. How then can documentary anticipate, and even represent, alternative possibilities and futures? This would seem an urgent question in times of climate breakdown. For Juan Francisco Salazar, this question is framed through an idea of the “creative treatment of possibility and potentiality, not just actuality” with documentary practices that speculate on the future and perform the imaginable (2017, 154). Considering the speculative potential of documentary, City’s New Malls not only tells the story of the Burnside Village tree, but seeks to configure what Anna Tsing proposes as “landscape as the protagonist of an adventure” (2015, 155). The co-existence of a mature tree and a shopping mall couldn’t seem more different, but what if we were to rethink nature as part of our lived and built environment, as Stephen Vogel suggests (2015).
City’s New Malls is constructed of a number of individual LiDAR scans captured through the Polycam app on an iPad Pro. These scans do not capture moving images, and don’t deal well with highly textured surfaces. While sophisticated LiDAR technologies do exist, as rendered by the iPad, the images, or meshes, are hyperreal while also appearing drippy, patchy, and flawed. They are familiar and strange at the same time. For this reason, they align with my broader research concerns as a documentary filmmaker and artist around questions of representation, indexicality and translation (Steyerl 2006). Destabilising the indexical image (or sound) invites the audience to consider what is happening here.
If the camera is often equated with an extension of the eye, recalling Vertov’s kino-eye, what other ways of ‘seeing’ can new mobile technologies such as photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning enable? Mandy Rose suggests that such “post-lenticular visualities” enable other forms of knowing less predicated on “the gaze as locus of knowledge”, and thereby less anthropocentric (2023).
To create City’s New Malls, I scanned the interiors of Burnside Village as well as a number of Eucalyptus trees in the area in Adelaide. The scans were then composited in Blender, an open-source 3D software. The intention was to create a protopian vision of the shopping mall. Using the scans allowed me to manipulate time and space to create heterotopic assemblages, where increasingly, the built environment and the ‘natural world’ become entwined, reflecting Haraway’s idea of naturecultures. Trees spring up through the floor of the mall, becoming increasingly dense throughout the film. These spaces speculate on posthuman agency and the capacity to subvert consumerist spaces into new assemblages of cohabitation.
References
Haraway, D., (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
Tsing, A. L., (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Rose, M., (2023). ‘Immersive nonfiction media and climate-resilient futures: affordances, exchanges and practice’ (presentation), Sightlines Filmmaking in the Academy Conference, University of South Australia.
Salazar, J. F., (2017). Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds. London, [England]: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Steyerl, H., (2006). ‘The language of things. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies 3’. https://artistsspace.org/media/pages/exhibitions/hito-steyerl/1128046083-1623172961/the_language_of_things.pdf.
Vogel, S., (2015). Thinking like a mall: environmental philosophy after the end of nature. MIT Press
City’s New Malls by Kim Munro
In 2011, Burnside Shopping Village in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide completed its upgrade and opened to the public. At the centre of the mall was a 100-year-old protected river red gum that couldn’t be removed. Attempts were made to keep the tree alive, first by providing a canopy of windows, and later through misting sprays and nutrient injections. Within two years, the tree was dead. Perhaps as a final act of resistance, the tree simply refused to be assimilated. Everyone I meet in Adelaide knows this story. It is folklore. But the battle between the built environment and these giant trees in Adelaide continues. While documentary does past tense very well, and present tense okay, it struggles with future tense. How then can documentary anticipate, and even represent, alternative possibilities and futures? This would seem an urgent question in times of climate breakdown. For Juan Francisco Salazar, this question is framed through an idea of the “creative treatment of possibility and potentiality, not just actuality” with documentary practices that speculate on the future and perform the imaginable (2017, 154). Considering the speculative potential of documentary, City’s New Malls not only tells the story of the Burnside Village tree, but seeks to configure what Anna Tsing proposes as “landscape as the protagonist of an adventure” (2015, 155). The co-existence of a mature tree and a shopping mall couldn’t seem more different, but what if we were to rethink nature as part of our lived and built environment, as Stephen Vogel suggests (2015).
City’s New Malls is constructed of a number of individual LiDAR scans captured through the Polycam app on an iPad Pro. These scans do not capture moving images, and don’t deal well with highly textured surfaces. While sophisticated LiDAR technologies do exist, as rendered by the iPad, the images, or meshes, are hyperreal while also appearing drippy, patchy, and flawed. They are familiar and strange at the same time. For this reason, they align with my broader research concerns as a documentary filmmaker and artist around questions of representation, indexicality and translation (Steyerl 2006). Destabilising the indexical image (or sound) invites the audience to consider what is happening here.
If the camera is often equated with an extension of the eye, recalling Vertov’s kino-eye, what other ways of ‘seeing’ can new mobile technologies such as photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning enable? Mandy Rose suggests that such “post-lenticular visualities” enable other forms of knowing less predicated on “the gaze as locus of knowledge”, and thereby less anthropocentric (2023).
To create City’s New Malls, I scanned the interiors of Burnside Village as well as a number of Eucalyptus trees in the area in Adelaide. The scans were then composited in Blender, an open-source 3D software. The intention was to create a protopian vision of the shopping mall. Using the scans allowed me to manipulate time and space to create heterotopic assemblages, where increasingly, the built environment and the ‘natural world’ become entwined, reflecting Haraway’s idea of naturecultures. Trees spring up through the floor of the mall, becoming increasingly dense throughout the film. These spaces speculate on posthuman agency and the capacity to subvert consumerist spaces into new assemblages of cohabitation.
References
Haraway, D., (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
Tsing, A. L., (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Rose, M., (2023). ‘Immersive nonfiction media and climate-resilient futures: affordances, exchanges and practice’ (presentation), Sightlines Filmmaking in the Academy Conference, University of South Australia.
Salazar, J. F., (2017). Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds. London, [England]: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Steyerl, H., (2006). ‘The language of things. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies 3’. https://artistsspace.org/media/pages/exhibitions/hito-steyerl/1128046083-1623172961/the_language_of_things.pdf.
Vogel, S., (2015). Thinking like a mall: environmental philosophy after the end of nature. MIT Press
Filmmaker
Filmmaker
Kim Munro
Kim Munro is a documentary maker, curator, researcher and educator. Her work across these fields explores how expanded practices, experimental forms, and emerging technologies intersect with social, cultural and environmental issues.
Kim Munro
Kim Munro is a documentary maker, curator, researcher and educator. Her work across these fields explores how expanded practices, experimental forms, and emerging technologies intersect with social, cultural and environmental issues.