CRANES and CUBE

VR, text, sound, 2019

Programming: by Adam Hutz

Cranes and Cube is a recreation of the city of Mecca that portrays my ambivalence about the discernable overlaps between religiosity, my familial history of performing the religious ritual of Hajj, the market economy, and the social inequality that is manifest in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Thinking of the city as a palimpsest in virtual reality, Cranes and Cube builds a layered city where the past and the present can be simultaneously visualized. My animation shows a large black cube representing the Kaaba—a pre-Islamic structure, assimilated by the Muslims as the holiest site in Islam. My version of the Kabba is surrounded by a forest of hand drawn construction cranes. In addition, this VR city has strange surrealist sculptures, which intentionally jam mismatched architectural forms, resulting in curious hybrid monuments made up of spectacular edifices, heavy ornamentation, and ostentatious moments in architectural design. 

Cranes and Cube assimilates the viewer in my version of Mecca that speaks about loss, the power dynamics at play in the tides of reconfiguration and remaking of locales, and the project talks about poverty and social exclusion which are visibly manifest under the shadows of the skyscrapers, where poor pilgrims and migrant laborers from Africa and South Asia reside in tents and other forms of temporary shelters.