Karl F. Stewart - Up Down Nowhere

Karl F. Stewart
Video

Berlin Conversations
Up Down Nowhere

00:07:05

Single channel video.

The expression life is full of ups and downs seems appropriate for a video based around escalators. These moving stairs come and go and always end somewhere. In this video the destination is the platform of an S-Bahn, U-Bahn or the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. And after all the ups and downs I have taken, a question lingers ... through all our journeys, where are we? Escalators and train stations are possibly a good metaphor for life. At the end of the escalator, another journey always begins. And the ups and downs of an escalator eventually form circles. We call them routines, history repeating itself. At the end of the ride we end up nowhere in particular and oddly enthusiastic to repeat the experience.

soundtrack featuring . Radio Free Clear Light . Experience Is a Tunnel Remix

There are several themes which run in the background in the creation of this video. What I feel should be the most obvious point is that there is no storyline. No one meets someone else and gets married. There is no drama played out. I do what I call video art. It is the simple notion of presenting everyday aspects of life in an aesthetically intriguing series of visual images. I call this the poetic in the midst of chaos. It is the search for beauty in a world which has turned against itself.

Today there appears to be an abundance of films/videos telling stories. I often wonder if this is a result of humanity's sense of feeling lost in a Universe we conjecture about, but know nothing about. Stories are maybe our way of looking for meaning in a life which in many ways could seem meaningless.

I do not have a story to tell and only offer the casual spectator a view on a world which I have seen and maybe you have ignored. Notwithstanding the difficulties of life, I easily find endless beauty to be experienced in the midst of our continuous mayhem.

I believe images are sensual. And as I move through Berlin, I find the city to be a visually seductive town. It is a physically rough city which still wears the scars of its history, but its beauty has never faded. And it is with these thoughts I attempt to make escalators and platforms visually alluring.

This town is rapidly becoming a gentrified city where its radical is chic, and its artistic tension is waning. Up Down Nowhere is a tribute to the Berlin which is or was always here, there and maybe nowhere, but is and always has been moving.