Antoni Muntadas The Limousine Project

A black stretch limousine has been transformed by Antonio Muntadas (b. 1942, Barcelona, Spain) to house four slide projectors. Images are projected from the limousine’s interior onto both right- and left-side passenger windows. These images are visible on exterior windows to passersby as the vehicle is driven throughout New York City. The limousine circles locations associated with those images depicted on the windows: Wall Street (economics), United Nations (politics), nightclubs (entertainment), and other places. Muntadas perceives The Limousine Project as a city-specific project for New York, where the limousine is an everyday symbol of power and the media in our society. The projections display words and images decontextualized from advertisements, headlines, and political slogans. Muntadas notes that the selection of these words and images is aimed at the reformulation of a current media event: “Censorship as Obscenity, Media Manipulation as Obscenity, Gentrification as Obscenity . . .” Through decontextualization and juxtaposition, the projections invited public dialogue on related issues within contemporary culture.