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Presented by
New Metro
Zoe Mars
We never reach the end of New Metro’s escalator: it stretches on forever, and we’re left waiting for a future that will never arrive. The endlessly-generated descent incrementally and procedurally evolves over the course of the evening, referencing the visual vernacular of Melbourne’s City Loop and shifting through a palette of utopian modernist design tropes.
Riffing on unrealised subway projects from Melbourne’s past, New Metro reflects on unobtainable futures, alternative realities and disappointed plans. It imagines a future where failed space-age aspirations have manifested as a subterranean metro system, buried in the collective unconscious of the urban environment, connected to the surface but completely inaccessible. Stepping onto the escalators takes you nowhere--the ‘future that could have been’ is always just out of reach.
Zoe Mars is an interdisciplinary artist who adores the outdated, the forgotten and the failed. She uses a mish-mash of drawing, performance, video and audio to create loving homages to classic sci-fi, technology and design, exploring themes of obsolescence and disappointment. Past projects include performance as the Ghost of Computers Past, a comic book about time travel, and an audio tour of an abandoned space museum.
