Exhibition video: “Come down and take a look”
The London2012 site has a video launching the new exhibition at City Hall.
The site does not allow its videos to be embedded elsewhere on the Net so this is a screengrab. The Blog entry reads:
“The exhibition is free and is on for three weeks. It includes a new interactive simulator that allows visitors to navigate their way around a computer-generated version of the Olympic Park. There are also models of the Park and major venues such as the Olympic Stadium and Velodrome.
Come down to City Hall to take a look!”
The video features Mayor Boris Johnson talking to schoolchildren, one of whom asks him which is his favourite venue, a question he then asks them.
With a little over 1,000 days to go before the event, 2012 is being articulated around the twin poles of ‘legacy’ and ‘architecture’. Johnson says:
“We’ve got to get the message across to everyone in london that the Olympics are a great thing, aren’t they? Do you think they’re a great thing or not?… Yeh that’s the spirit. It’s a massive investment that will help to give jobs and growth in areas of London that need it.”
While the narrator from the ODA says:
“Come and see what London 2012 is all about.”
While the ODA uses a visual discourse of Great-Exhibition-like spectacle and wonder, it positions that in terms of ‘discovery’, hailing the viewer into a phantasmagoria, but one that reveals a truth.
Johnson similarly imag(in)es a ‘wonder’ but one underpinned by economic and political legacy.
What both do is locate those discourses around visualisations, models, ‘interactive fly-throughs’ and images – a power-full scopic imag(in)ing.
