JUMP

CUTS

The popularization of cinema in the 1920s quickly made the theater marquee a familiar urban feature. Part shelter and part advertisement, the informational canopy transgressed the property line of the theater to reach into the civic space of the sidewalk. The marquee’s function of transmitting information to the street was fully realized at night, when its illuminated displays would engage in a form of seduction.

A contemporary rendition of the cinema marquee requires not only a technical revision but also a reconsideration of urban communication. Jump Cuts, a permanent installation at the United Artists Pavilion Theatre, in San Jose, reinterprets the marquee as an urban interface. An external armature on the theater’s street-facing facade supports liquid-crystal panels which phase between a transparent mode and a translucent state suitable for video projection. A corresponding array of projectors is mounted on the inside face of the curtain wall. Video cameras positioned over the escalators capture views of patrons as they ascend and descend, while cameras located in the theater projection rooms pan across audiences.

From the street, views into the theater’s glazed multi-level lobby alternate between actual glimpses through the transparent curtain wall and live video feeds. The visual connection between the exterior and interior is periodically interrupted by movie trailers: candid images of moviegoers are given equal status with Hollywood blockbusters. Drawing inspiration from the grand social spaces of nineteenth-century theaters such as the Paris Opera — whose circulation area exceeds that of its performance space by a ratio of five to one — the installation asks the question: where does the spectacle begin and end?

The panels are etched with texts visible only when the projectors are inactive. From outside, one inscription reads: “Truth is stranger than fiction is stran­ger than truth.” From within the lobby, the other reads: “Life imitates art imitates life.”