An audio-visual-sensory train journey through the Salzkammergut, on location, on a curated app, and in virtual reality.

A project for the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024 by Petra Ardai, Ella Raidel, and Marlene Rutzendorfer.

Regional Express is an audio-visual immersive narrative (immersive storytelling) taking place on a rail route between Gmunden and Bad Aussee, dealing with the cultural and natural heritage of the region. While traveling on the train, an immersive experience is produced as a journey through time and memory as a curated application and in virtual reality (360 Cinematic Film).

The narrative will be developed by the participating population and as a speculative story communicated to the region and an international audience. Like memory, it is composed of fragments, nourished by facts and fiction, and its performative nature allows for new perspectives. The stories expand beyond the personal; the perspective changes its character as the narrator, the glacier affected by climate change, and the transformation of rocks that bear the chronicles of the history of mankind. Along the way, different protagonists get on the train, new encounters occur, and audio-visual landscapes expand memory and imagination. The dramaturgy develops through the parameter of the train as a stage, which is a limited space, the route as the timeline, the travel speed, and the stops as a cadence for a sensory experience.

The project is developed in several medial stages, interlocked at all times and communicated to the public. At the beginning, workshops will serve to generate ideas, and the results will be documented on a website. For the year of the Capital of Culture 2024, the narrative will be presented as an immersive experience and prepared for an international audience as virtual reality into the future.

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The films of Ella Raidel

Of Haunted Spaces

Cinema, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyperurbanization

Edited by Ute Meta Bauer

with contributions from Itty Abraham, Ute Meta Bauer, Marlene Rutzendorfer, and Yu Weiying

As amalgams of the different spatial logics of other places, reassembled by globalization and the fantasies of real estate development, cities today are becoming what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias. Assemblies of ruins, theme parks, entirely copied towns, simulacra, business districts on a globalized template, reconstructed historic districts, settlements, and ghost towns are finding a new expression in the contemporary world. Nowhere is this more visible recently than in China and in areas coming under China’s developmental influence. Copied cities, ghost cities, and large-scale Chinese investments in Africa are heterotopias because they contain the idea of accumulating different times, cultures, and countries within one place, just as a theme park contains all these different place experiences in a bounded zone outside of its own time and culture.

Ella Raidel has explored these phenomena through film and cinematic virtual reality, and this artist’s book reviews and reflects on the last two decades of her award-winning work. In Ella Raidel’s films, urbanism and architecture, theory, politics, social change, and image production are intertextually presented and open a discursive space for investigation and commentary. This book will be interesting for art and film practitioners and students of architecture, film, urbanization, and infrastructure, especially those who see cinema as a way of exploring these subjects.

Published by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

ISBN: 978-981-18-5893-2

Distributed by NUS Press Singapore

Editor: Ute Meta Bauer

Designer: Swell Design Singapore

Printer: First Printers Singapore

NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore

Block 6, Lock Road

Gillman Barracks

Singapore 108934

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