Flying Pictures

A Film installation IN THREE STATIONS BY Adolf Winkelmann

First Station / roof top, outside
U-Tower picture clock

Film maker Adolf Winkelmann created on behalf of the City of Dortmund a uniue film installation. A huge media facade called U-TOWER PICTURE CLOCK illuminates the U-Tower building using 1,7 Mio. LED spots on the rooftop, giving travelers and nighthawks orientation. Winkelmann creates the sense of a space behind the colonnades and fills it with life, with imaginary water or with beer. Every hour on the hour it is inhabited by large pigeons. As a secular church tower the U-Tower is intended to give signs of light, signs of life, sketch silhouettes of human motion onto the sky above the Ruhr. The observer looks into the building’s interior as though through a gauze, which is more or less transparent, depending on the weather, the season and the light conditions, indeed different from minute to minute.

Second Station / entrance hall
Ruhr Panoramas

On eleven screens suspended above the visitors’ heads, Winkelmann shows associatively assembled panoramas composed of characteristic landscapes and sights of the region, his map of the Ruhr Metropolis. It is a stream of images of documentary views, taken in many locations in the Ruhr area.

Third Station / Vertical Art Space
Nine Windows 

The film staging continues in the stairwell, making even a ride on the escalator an experience. The installation invites the visitors to explore the museum storeys or to have a look at the creative workshops. Nine virtual image windows open up on the vertical art space’s internal wall. They take the form of small square holes in the concrete, facing outwards or inwards, over three storeys. These image windows are the stage setting for the people of the Ruhr, for their attitude to life, their desire, their language.