Time Square – interactive video

2013

The former New York Hotel in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, closed and abandoned since 2005, opened its doors to public for one week during Hungarian Cultural Days.
An eclectic style 120 years old building, located in the center of the city, once was the meeting point for artists, writers, cultural people from Cluj and other cities. During this week took place a group exhibition called “New York, New York, or come with me in the room,” where contemporary artists will reinterpret the old days of the hotel. My project was a video made of old pictures of the building, of the owners or the people who visited it, and some old video footage representing the interbelic life style. The film was projected in one of the old hotel rooms on the window, like a passage through time and space. A small camera captured the images of the visitors and reprojected them on the old film. The visitor’s image was drawn only with white lines. As the persons went closer to the window, the film scaled slightly bigger, just suggesting the entrance in old times, the meeting with the other time’s people. It is an invitation for the viewer to a meeting with the old times, to meet those people, to talk to them, sit at a table with them, have a drink, walk in the city center and feed the pigeons along them.