Cinema will die. Simply put, the scarcity of real estate+ the shrinkage of media devices+ the rising standards of viewing comforts guarantee it (gotta pee? Hit pause. No giant bouffant in front of you. No coughing, wheezing, pushing...you get the idea.)
The Orbus is envisioned as the last monument to the dying hegemony of the entertainment power establishment. There the upper crust weepy for a softer time may watch black and whites and relive nostalgia.
Like a last flight of a giant airship. Or a rickety train ride on the Orient Express with all the tinkly fixings appropriate to public consumption of trust funds.
For this too will disappear: when the last flickers go down squatters can live conveniently once the appropriate decor is established (undercarriage awaits decorative graffiti to blend in to the surroundings, to be accepted.)
And just as the site is a stacking of fill stolen from a million basements, so too does the East River swallow it back as it rises. One day to be cast at sea: internal units float off as some ark, each a hermetically sealed vessel, formally a theater now a life raft or love boat seeking either survival or a new adventure.
To rise as some epic barn raising, first sticks, then ribs as a whale, it shall be clad in thinshell concrete as most epic constructions are wont to be. By great girth and flickering portholes the last cinema becomes theater- no longer hidden but amplified and brandishing myriad memes:
an object
a watertower
a shipbuilding thing
a waterfront contraption
a pristine globe
an ocular net
a deathstar
a deep-sea diving helmet
a time capsule
a dream sphere
an orb
a site uncrowned
View Original