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Very
much in the spirit of the Parisian arcades that fascinated
Walter Benjamin in the early 1900s, the postmodern train
stations and shopping arcades of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto,
Osaka and Hiroshima allow the images and characters
of many cultures and narratives to collide and create
a media-inspired
hybrid culture of intermixed narrative and myth,
a physical manifestation of what Benjamin refers to
as the subconscious desires and dreams of hybrid cultures
made visible or “actual” in the media collages
of early 20th century industrial culture. In The
Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss refers to
Benjamin’s vision this way:
“Underneath the surface
of increasing systemic rationalization, on an unconscious
‘dream’ level, the new urban-industrial
world had become fully re-enchanted. In the modern city,
as in the ur-forests of another era, the ‘threatening
and alluring face’ of myth was alive and everywhere.
It peered out of wall posters advertising ‘toothpaste
for giants,’ and whispered its presence in the
most rationalized urban plans that ‘with their
uniform streets and endless rows of buildings, have
realized the dreamed-of architecture of the ancients:
the labyrinth.’ It appeared, prototypically, in
the arcades, where ‘the commodities are suspended
and shoved together in such boundless confusion, that
[they appear] like images out of the most incoherent
dreams.’” (Buck-Morss,
p. 254). |
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