Norman Klein,
Los Angeles, May 1998

The older nineteenth century model of the city is in jeopardy, as an emerging paradigm develops out of the metropolitan suburb. In other words, the postwar suburbs in the US have matured to the point that they represent a coherent model for redesigning even the older cities of Europe, as in the Podsdammer Platz, for example. The layers of a city increasingly are built on media memories, on the excavation of consumer history. We see the fictions generated by mass culture starring at us like Baroque fountains in the middel of every city. In fact, ours is an electronic baroque civilization.

In the tissue of media traces that Stephan Doesinger installs upon the surface of cities, we see the electronic baroque as ahaunted montage. Or not even simply a montage, but rather a fractured newsreel of what passed, but never stayed, like a phantom train, never entirely solid, but somehow traveling through us, like a gas, very faint, like a movie projection of a train.

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