Description
1,000 Platitudes is a large-scale photographic intervention project. It is comprised of photomontages and a video with 1,000 words or expressions commonly used to promote globalised cities to potential investors, such as “open”, “modern”, “clean”, “multicultural” and “cosmopolitan”, for example. To make these images, a powerful projector (110,000 ANSI lumens of intensity for images of up to 70 x 70 metres) was placed on a 12-ton truck with a generator. This mobile platform toured the Austrian city of Linz projecting onto all types of buildings: shopping malls, apartment blocks, banks, castles, churches, industrial tanks and others. At each site a letter of the alphabet was projected and then photographed before the authorities were notified.

Sources of reference for this project include Etiénne-Gaspar Robertson’s Phantascope (1797), a phantasmagoria projector on wheels; Krzysztof Wodiczko’s deconstructivist projections, and the ShotgunTV project by Contained/Timesup (1995).

Year of creation
2003
Technique
Three Lambda C-Prints mounted on aluminium frames, and documentary video, 25 minutes long.
Edition: 5 + 1 AP in English and 5 + 1 AP in Spanish
Dimensions
300 x 120 cm each (3 panels)

Exhibitions
• Art Brussels, Guy Bärtschi 2005
• Art Basel, OMR, Basel 2005
• bitforms Seoul 2005
• Guy Bärtschi, Geneva 2005
• FIAC, Guy Bärtschi, Paris 2005
• Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami 2005
• ARCO, OMR, Madrid 2004
• Art Cologne, bitforms 2004
• bitforms, NYC 2003
• Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico 2003
• "Radiant City Exhibition", (curator : Achille Bonito Oliva), Fundación Bancaja, Valencia 2003
• Art Basel Miami, OMR 2003

Photos
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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, "1000 Platitudes" (2007). Photomontages and DVD. Photos by Antimodular Research.

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Rafael Lozano-Hemmer — concept, photography, direction
Conroy Badger — programming
Natalie Bouchard, Matthew Marino, Julia Garcia, Ana Parga — production support.

This project was developed during the HUMO (Huge and Mobile) Workshop organized by Lozano-Hemmer and Brian Massumi at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, with the support of V2_Organisatie in Rotterdam, and funded by the European Union.