Photo by Gianni Plescia

Michael Portnoy

Photo © 2007 by MCH Swiss Exhibition (Holding) Ltd.

Mike Nelson, "The Pumpkin Palace" (2007)

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Even the somewhat banal topography of the city of Basel becomes somewhat wackily performative when one boards the Tram Obscura. New York-based British artist Simon Lee has transformed the interior of a city tram into a functioning pinhole camera by encasing it in black plastic perforated by hundreds of tiny holes. As the train moved along, these projected repeated upside-down images of the passing scenery-trees, houses, cars, and pedestrians.

The topsy-turvy experience was heightened by the soundtrack composed by Walter Sipser, a multilingual mélange of eclectic ditties, robotic commands that tweaked the tram's automated announcements ("Passengers on the right can just make out beneath the clouds the contours of Iceland"), and wry musings such as, "It has long been unclear what language birds are speaking, or what they are trying to express. It is possible what they are trying to say to each other is, ‘You be quiet.' ‘No, you be quiet.'"

An accompanying text pledged to lead viewers "into unfamiliar ways of perceiving that can put everyday life in a new light and knock fixed opinions off their rails." The journey was indeed disorienting, perhaps above all because it was unclear where in the city we were at any given time, and the tram's few stops went unannounced. We wound up parked in a garage on the outskirts of town, and were simply told to disembark and left to our own devices to find our way back. Which gives new meaning to the phrase "get lost."