The Panorama of the City of New York painstakingly recreates every architectural structure in the five boroughs of New York City at a scale of 1:1200. An encircling walkway offers visitors an aerial view, mimicking what might be seen from a helicopter tour over the city.
Romanticized All Out of Proportion sites 7 miniature cameras on the Panorama in order to recreate the camera angles of specific scenes from movies that take place in New York City. A live feed connects the cameras to 7 LCD screens mounted along the walkway, whose speakers play the original soundtrack excerpt from the chosen film.
"Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion." Uh, no, make that: "He-he...romanticized it all out of proportion. Now...to him...no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin."
—Dialogue from Manhattan, directed by Woody Allen
There is a feeling you get when you step out of an Itallian or Dutch gallery into a city that seems the very reflection of the paintings you have just seen, as if the city had just come out of the paintings and not the other way around. An American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then begin with the city and move inward toward the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outward toward the city.
—Jean Baudrillard
Romanticized All Out of Proportion
2002 – 2003
Miniature cameras, cables, CD players, LCD monitors
The Queens Museum of Art, New York
Next to each screen was a label showing a still from the real movie, while on the LCD screen appeared a live feed from the Panorama of the scene in question. Woody Allen’s Manhattan 1977) and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) were among the common cinematic references.