ATC Lecture: Bull.Miletic, The Revolving Restaurant as Hypercinema December 5, 2011

In the early 1960s cities around the world raced to build revolving restaurants atop hotels, office buildings, and communication towers, considering them to be unequivocal symbols of modernity and progress. From a purely technical standpoint, the revolving restaurant can be characterized as a form of kinetic architecture invented in the wake of postwar progress and technological optimism in Germany in 1959. Today there are hundreds of such restaurants spinning around the world, and their elevated "revolving views" continue to attract and impress patrons across generations.
The "view in motion" evokes film language, as if in a single take with a ninety-minute panoramic sweep. Bull.Miletic will discuss how the revolving restaurant transforms the view into a cinematic experience and how this "rotating view" is related to moving pictures from a historical perspective. Their main goal is to discover whether the revolving restaurant can be seen as the ultimate hypercinematic interface, which inverts the paradoxes of cinematic spectatorship.

Bull.Miletic are Synne Bull and Dragan Miletic who live and work together in Oslo, Norway. Central to their artistic practice is the question of how moving pictures form conceptions of space and influence our visual perception of reality. They were the recipients of the Bay Area Video Coalition's "Video Maker Award", and have received professional grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Arts Council Norway, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Office for Contemporary Art Norway and CEC ArtsLink among others. Their work has been nominated for Rockefeller Media Art Award as well as SFMoMA's SECA Art Award. They were artists in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin, Nordic Artists' Center Dale, and Cite Internationale des Arts Paris.

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