Strategic Operation – Hyperrealistic

2015, 22min, FHD, single channel video, stereo sound, color

The deserts of California call up mirages. These phantoms are notfakes, but reflections of things that actually exist somewhere else. This desert is sometimes a future planet roamed by extraterrestrials, sometimes a war-ridden Baghdad, and at times a projection space for the hallucinations of hippies. Strategic Operations—Hyperrealistic is the second piece in Park Minha’s film special effects series. This work focuses on the Baghdad-like military bases (Medina Wasl) built by Hollywood’s special effects companies mainly in California’s Mojave Desert, and the strange apparitions created by the numerous Hollywood movie sets located in the desert’s surrounding areas. Here, movies are sometimes filmed within military complexes, and military training is carried out on used movie sets, such as on the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch used to film Iron Man. A film about a desert in which cinema and reality are intermingled, home to strange spectacles created by special effects.