David Cowlard
An asynchronous timing is in play.
The Downtown Shopping Centre opened on 30 April 1975. It was the only mall in the Auckland Central Business District and boasted 80 stores over three floors. It closed forty-one years later on 28 May 2016 to a fanfare of signage advertising retro prices and a further 50% off everything.
Demolition was complete by November 2016 yet the mall continues to be a digital presence located on screen back to March 2008 when the first Google Street View surveys of the city were recorded. Yet the viewpoint of a digital ‘drone’ forced inside the surrounding high-rise structures, reveals only the approximate presence of buildings, spaces and surrounding urban life. Wireframes and voids.
Superficially the digital presence of these partially rendered buildings conform to the world that can be calculated and measured using satellite imagery and lasers, but systems of logarithmic space, memory of place and glitches create an alternative urban imaginary that fails to register any certainty of place. These are unreliable landscapes.
This work is created from manipulated screen recordings of areas under redevelopment as part of the construction of Commercial Bay and the City Rail Link in Auckland, New Zealand. The sound track has been created using field recordings of the demolition of the Downtown Shopping Centre and an analog delay unit.
Unreliable Landscapes – Downtown Auckland , 2017. HD video: 3” with stereo sound
David Cowlard is a filmmaker, photographer, sound artist and educator. His interdisciplinary practice explores new forms of architectural representation, the city and everyday life and he has a particular interest in how moving image, field recording and locative media can inform a wider critical engagement with the built environment.
David is Programme Leader for Photo Media at Whitecliffe, Auckland.
He publishes across various digital platforms as @photourbanist