PROJECTS
Mira Abdulla - Rarified
Erin Roberts - Screen - Tribune - Theater
Infrastructures of Imagination
What does it mean to call a movie theater an institution? Institutions are both material and conceptual; physical and abstract. Institutions emerge from the collective beliefs of a society and endure to steward the continuity of those beliefs. The movie theater? Movies are media, and our society’s contemporary media consumption habits trend anything but collective. Today, most of us engage media in echo chambers. We consume alone, in the basement, or nestled behind the digital veil of Iphone’s privacy mode. There, we seek out digital communities of consensus, reinforcing our political and social ideologies, and trolling those who do not share our views. But the movie theater was once the dominant spatial format for media consumption, and one in which media was consumed collectively, in a single space, while contending with one-another. Movie theaters were public media infrastructures — infrastructures of imagination. This studio section recovered the history of the movie theater as an institution. We looked back at visionary early theaters, proposals for experimental cinemas, and several pre-cinematic precedents for collective media consumption. Critically mining these precedents, students proposed contemporary movie theaters that disrupt current trends toward atomized media consumption, reasserting movie theaters as instruments of collective life.