For Berlin- and New York-based artist Brockmann, the placement of Seat#12 in Tivoli Gardens represents a reference to the tradition of the amusement park, a tradition that has consistently combined technology and human interaction to create compelling experiences.

This tradition has frequently taken the form of experimental installations, and the related experiments have often led to the integration of technological innovations into society, as evidenced by Luna Park at Coney Island, where technologies were tested for the city of New York. Architect Rem Koolhaas explores this phenomenon in his book Delirious New York, capturing the dreamlike collision of fantasy and function that defined early modern urbanism.

QUOTE- ‘The glare is everywhere, and nowhere a shadow.’ (Maxim Gorky, Boredom)

‘What a sight the poor make in the moonlight.’ (James Huneker. The New Cosmopolis)

‘Hell is very badly done.’ (Maxim Gorky, Boredom)

MODEL

„Now, where the waste was … rise to the sky a thousand glittering towers and minarets, graceful, stately and imposing. The morning sun looks down on these as it might upon the magically realized dream of a poet or painter.“

„At night. the radiance of the millions of electric lights which glow at every point and line and curve of the great play city’s outlines lights up the sky and welcomes the home coming marmer thirty miles from the shore.“!

„With the advent of night a fantastic city of fire suddenly rises from the ocean into the sky. Thousands of ruddy sparks glimmer in the darkness, limning in fine, sensitive outline on the black background of the sky shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces and temples.“

„Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air. They intertwine in transparent flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away, in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters. Fabulous beyond conceiving, ineffably beautiful, is this fiery scintillation.“

Coney Island around 1905: it is no coincidence that the countless „impressions of Coney Island“ – products of a hopelessly obstinate desire to record and preserve a mirage – can all be substituted not only for each other but also for the flood of later descriptions of Manhattan. At the junction of the 19th and 20th centuries, Coney Island is the incubator for Manhattan’s incipient themes and infant mythology. The strategies and mechanisms that later shape Manhattan are tested in the laboratory of Coney Island before they finally leap toward the larger island.

Coney Island IS a fetal Manhattan.

In 1903, the year the new Williamsburg Bridge injects even more visitors into Coney Island’s already overtaxed system, [designer] Frederic Thompson and [entrepreneur] Elmer Dundy open a second park – Luna. […] Thompson doubles the isolation of Luna Park by imposing a theme that embraces the entire site in a system of metaphorical meaning: its surface is to be „not of this earth“ but part of the Moon. On entering, Luna Park’s masses are turned into astronauts in a conceptual airlock through which they all have to pass:

„The Trip to the Moon on the airship Luna IV … Once on board of the great airship, her huge wings rise and fall, the trip is really begun and the ship is soon 100 feet in the air. A wonderful, widespread panorama of the surrounding sea, Manhattan and Long Island seems to be receding as the ship mounts upward.

„Houses recede from view until the earth fades from sight, while the Moon grows larger and larger. Passing over the Lunar satellite the barren and desolate nature of its surface is seen.

„The airship gently settles, the landing made, and the passengers enter the cool caverns of the Moon….“

In one gesture, the whole structure of mutually reinforcing realities on earth – its laws, expectations, inhibitions – is suspended to create a moral weightlessness that complements the literal weightlessness that has been generated on the trip to the Moon. – END OF QUOTE  (from Rem Kohlhaas: Delirious New York)

 

You’re warmly invited by Jenny Brockmann to try it yourself. Have a seat in Seat #12.

 

Jenny Brockmann is an artist and sculptor living in Berlin and New York. Her works combine technology, science, and art, and have been shown internationally. She studied fine art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she was a student of Rebecca Horn, and received a diploma in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin. Brockmann creates works characterized by discursive aesthetics.