LUAS CAROL
HD Video Installation. 38’28”. 2009
With sound by Jean-Philippe Renoult & DinahBird
In Cinema, a dolly is a wheeled camera platform on rails that moves smoothly and noiselessly during filming while the camera is running. We imagined the LUAS to be such a machine, a sort of moving eye gliding through the city, seeing without commentary just as its bone-rattling predecessors would have; existing solely to provide us with perfectly smooth moving shots of Dublin.
Luas Carol is a cinematic voyage on this new urban light railway; nascent heir to an urban transport idea that embodied Dublin’s urban identity from the end of the 19th century until the mid 1950s. A subject for literature, cinema and photography, the Dublin tramway also served as a focus for social and political struggles, and so holds a significant place in the collective memory that defines our city.
This film represents not one journey but a composite image of many journeys in many different times or seasons. The shots, realistic and concrete as the train slows down and stops, transform as the train gathers speed. Words, sounds, and images from another Dublin, another time, another place, an impression, an image or an idea all merge to recreate the dreamy, almost drugged state that one slips into while looking out of the window of a moving carriage. Luas Carol is an ideal journey, where movement, sights, and sounds reflect the living, changing city.
A delirious sound environment, created by Parisian radio artists Jean Philippe Renoult and Dinahbird, accompanies your trip on Dublin’s newest urban light railway.
