A collaboration between David Pledger and visual artist Callum Morton, Walk-In Drive-In mixes sculpture, sound and video as inter-textual and interactive elements that activate the architectural and social landscapes of the suburban drive-in in the latter half of 20th C. Australia.

The built form is a split-level structure comprising an interior space and an exterior space. Inside, the walls and the corridor are mirrored around a 3-step ziggurat on which the audience can have an eye-level, panoramic view of the external space which is a scale version of a drive-in: two active screens, vertical stands for sound-speakers and a projection-house, a model of de Corbussier’s 1929 modernist house, Villa Savoy. 

Two films play in dialogue on the two screens projecting film leader, revolving blocks of primary colours and images from drive-in movies selected by genre: action, horror, soft-porn, suspense. Driven by a 5-minute tonal scape amplifying the frequency of a standard television test-pattern signal, the films are cut to different lengths – one film plays five times, the other 6 times – but simultaneously resolve at 30 minutes. This visual structure is interrupted between 2:00 and 3:00 in the tonal scape when both screens play the same images at the same time for one minute, building into the viewing experience a constant state of arousal and release.

For Arts House Melbourne, Walk-In Drive-In shrinks in scale. The gigantic proportions are traded for a diminutive, ambient rendition of the themes of nostalgia, arousal and suburban dystopia played from Dusk Till Dawn.