Thirtyfour Parking Lots
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“The first thing that hit me was the number of people that were coming here. In the late 1950s there were something like 1000 people a day bringing in 750 cars every day. I was overwhelmed by that, and also by the smog”.
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Said Ed Ruscha 60 years ago, when he moved from Oklahoma to Los Angeles.
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The automobile industry adds 90 million vehicles to the planet per year (OICA.net Oct.2016). We don’t consider the environmental damage we cause to our world.
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Most cars are parked 95% of the time on average (Donald Shoup, UCLA professor, May 2005). What a waste of resources, time, and space!
In thirty-four parking lots, I have captured all the emerging parking lots that are required for all the new and existing cars, but I have shown mainly vacant ones, in order to bring attention to a future situation that is going to disrupt our present mobility and the paradigms of private vehicles.
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10 years from now, I’m sure we will mainly be using self-driving cars, ordering our mobility on our smartphones, and no longer have our own cars. The average daily use of a vehicle will increase tremendously and we will no longer need as many cars. By the same token, the number of newly built cars will decline dramatically and impact the entire industry. Keeping this in mind, I’m therefore confident that all parking lots will be demonstrating the ghostly emptiness that has been captured in my work.
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In my work, I only look at symptoms, the real issues are not visually present. The parking lots I have captured don’t necessarily have to be in Wels, they could be anywhere, they are placeholders and represent parking lots per se.
