Lokomotywownia is a site-specific installation located in a disused train repair depot in Krakow, Poland. The history of the region, its old technologies and its witnessing of the passing of time, and the transient, are brought into conversation through the rediscovery and intervention of the site. The train’s previous life and its trajectory of motion are mimicked in the reciprocal motion of the iPads – they are alive, the train is now stationary. Motorised tracks, built inside one of the abandoned carriages, allow the materiality of the site to define the structure of the recording device. The captured footage is then played back on eight iPads that move around the space, mapping the carriage interior and re-tracing the exact path of the camera, spatially and temporally. As the iPads drift slowly across the surfaces of the abandoned railway carriage, the exact representation in scale is seen on the screens, highlighting the architectural site below.
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The site was open for audience feedback at strategically positioned points in the project. In most cases, the feedback dramatically informed the practical and technical development of the work. An example being that during one of the site-performances the feedback gained from all participants suggested that the speed of the iPad motorised installation was too fast, as one participant wrote, “It is hard to really see the image on the screen, it is moving so fast that I tend to look at the iPad as an object rather than a screen”. This feedback was fundamental to the development of the piece as the experiential effect only worked when the speed was fast enough to be seen as a surface texture, but slow enough for the viewer to be immersed in the screen image.
In Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in art, Architecture and Film, Bruno (2002) discusses "this shift away from the long-standing focus of film theory on sight, towards the construction of a moving theory of site". This movement from optic to haptic reflects film's position within the spatial arts, sitting more comfortably next to architecture and theatre than many of the visual arts. Traditional theories of the ‘filmic gaze’ fail to address the effect of spatiality; the act of crossing or inhabiting space is not explored or explained. The work is both a preservation and a transformation. It preserves the site’s memory through precise documentation and playback, while simultaneously transforming it into a living, breathing artwork. By making motion visible within stillness and stillness palpable within motion, Lokomotywownia offers a meditation on time, space, and the ways in which technology mediates our relationship to history and place.
