Star City / Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard (2000)
By Jane & Louise Wilson
Video shot in 303 Gallery, New York City, 2000: an installation by Jane and Louise Wilson that combines two of their moving image works, Star City and Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard. Star City is 8 minutes long. I don't know the length of the second work, but they are both integrated pretty much seamlessly into one ongoing loop. The installation's footage was originally shot on 16mm and transferred to DVD for exhibition. This record of the installation was shot on a DV camera. "Like Leni Riefenstahl, the British twins Jane and Louise Wilson create works that estheticize power, but to obviously different ends. Unlike Hitler's favorite filmmaker, their film installations are more funereal than triumphant. For their newest odes to eroded power and faded glory, a pair of videos called Star City and Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard, the Wilsons were granted access to high-security sites of the financially stricken and scaled-back Russian space program. The videos were shot, respectively, at Star City, the main training center for Russian cosmonauts just outside Moscow, and the Baikonur cosmodrome, the massive base of the space program located in modern-day Kazakhstan (though the prog…
Watch Star City / Proton, Unity, Energy, Blizzard on Fast Ubu