The Registry of Culture of NRW, Guetersloh presents: My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar a new work by Carlo Zanni. Set in the city of Ahlen, Germany, The Sunset Terrace Bar, imitates an amateur’s film of the landscape framed at sunset. While the city strip is prerecorded the sky is captured in real time from a webcam shooting the sky of Naples (Italy) at sunset and as such, always changing.

The work, confronting themes such as exile, migration and border control, is enhanced by a poem by the esteemed author Ghada Samman and music by the international band Gotan Project and legendary composer Gabriel Yared. People visiting the website can choose upon two ways to experience the work: a live mode, available only in a specific time frame during the sunset in Naples or browsing through the archive where a time accelerated HD version of the movie is rendered every day and archived online.

The project is fully realized with a website created in collaboration with Estudio Soma from Buenos Aires and a poster designed with Wien based studio Sheriff: they both act as complementary vectors investigating the borders of the concept at the core of the work.

With My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar, Carlo Zanni keeps investigating what he calls DATA CINEMA: a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live data feedback gathered from the Net, to create time based social consciousness experiences.

The entire project is filmed with a webcam (a) set on a tripod shooting with a frequency of 20 frames per minute for a period of about thirteen hours, in fact all the camera moves are added in postproduction. The footage is first edited and then processed to extract a final “mask” containing the city strip in motion. A custom-made server-side software gathers feedback from a live webcam (b) shooting the sky of Naples in a timeframe that includes the sunset and continuously glues it to the city strip.

The software has the ability to behave either as client or server (or both) depending on its license. It could be configured in other ways than the one originally programmed for, giving birth to new experiences. After adding music and words, the film is uploaded online. The project can be experienced from its website containing a section called ENTER from where to access the LIVE MODE and the ARCHIVE. The Live Mode doesn’t save any movie, instead keeps rendering new films that are available for view only in a specific dynamic time frame during the sunset (it changes with seasons).

The Archive hosts a selection of HD versions rendered with a “time acceleration” process with the sunset coming from the day before. The Archive also contains multi language subtitled versions of the film. More about the project here [PDF].