People who trash elevators

A flying carpet, guided by means of a leash, wafts past a sketched, surrealistic landscape. Marked by technological progress through high-rise buildings, futuristic industrial plants, pipes, construction cranes et al., yet desolate and devoid of human beings, this world seems to be simultaneously under construction and in decay. As if emerging out of a black void or from the receding sea, there arises a piece of land whose beginning and end become visible during the course of the video like a circular panoramic picture. The constant repetition of the landscape images conveys after some time the impression of turning with the carpet in an endless circle.

James G. Ballard's novel 'High-Rise' from 1975, in which he develops the anti-utopia of a degenerated society which has succumbed to barbarism in a highly technologised jungle of high-rise buildings, provided in a certain sense the inspiration for this video.

In a dynamic relationship between traditional drawing and video animation, authentic representation and abstracting fiction, as well as in the encounter, effected by what is at once a poetically magical and rationally chill metaphor, between a dreamt, long-gone world and an empty, new world, Katja Davar explores the interplay between technological progress and social disintegration. (Simone Jung)