INFO
CINLAND (Cinema Landscape) is the landscape urbanism practice of Eric Ellingsen. CINLAND is a “vacancy to vibrancy” public art & design laboratory. CINLAND co-produces living landscape-art infrastructure project-based research models, fairly & safely through interdisciplinary international-to-local collaboration. Rather than conducting extractive, yet often well-intended but too-remote research at a distance, CINLAND directly addresses research in urban vacancy by actively living its ideas in real-world public-space arenas with real business partners. CINLAND engages with simple office tools, like printers, cutting mats, scissors, glue, blue painters-tape, pens and pencils, last straws, garden tools, and relatively affordable mobile sound/vision technology.
Ellingsen opened CINLAND in St Louis City in partnership with a large real-estate developer, Spinniker Reality, to evolve a new form of public “art infrastructure” in a large 2600’ sft downtown plaza (22’ ceilings; 110’ of windowfront; 67’ of covered public arcade), which the real-estate owner leases him (unsigned). Projects in the arcade, plaza, and community facing windowfronts are equipped with inconspicuous and significant sound and visualization technology. With local artists, curators, musicians, poets, gardeners and electron tinkerers, Ellingsen has learned how to, as musician artist Brian Eno says, transform urban vacancy with specific address and local business neighbors, how to transform vacant spaces into “instruments”, not just “playback devices”. CINLAND will remain intact as an active art & design laboratory even as Ellingsen's research carries him in and out of healthy vibrant research ports.
