Terence Gower

New Utopias is a lec­ture about pop cul­ture utopias filmed in the style of a 1950s Walt Dis­ney doc­u­men­tary. The set, cos­tum­ing, light­ing and cam­era work are based on 1950s tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion stan­dards. But where the orig­i­nal Dis­ney doc­u­men­taries cel­e­brated rock­ets and nu­clear tech­nol­ogy, this up­dated ver­sion pro­motes aes­thetic friv­o­lity, sex­ual per­ver­sion and UFO ab­duc­tion fan­tasies. Among the new utopias un­der analy­sis are an afro­fu­tur­ist ex­trater­res­trial so­ci­ety, a dreary French sea­side town trans­formed into an aes­thetic par­adise, and a retelling of the Franken­stein myth set in a sex­ual utopia ruled by the un­in­hib­ited li­bido. This video is shown ac­com­pa­nied by the Moth­er­ship Blue­prints.

Doc­u­men­ta­tion: Video ex­cerpt; pro­duc­tion photo; video stills; in­stal­la­tion at La­bor, Mex­ico City; pro­jec­tion at Art­Basel Mi­ami Beach

Ter­ence Gower, 2010

HD Video, 17 min­utes