Bailterspace Dome

This film is sound-tracked by the band Bailterspace's trademark sonic guitarscapes, as it washes over the subways and streets of their adopted home of New York. The star of "Dome" is "Miyata Jiro", a performance art robotic businessman - a "corporation solider" - that crawls along the ground in his nice suit. It's the work of New York-based Japanese performance artist Momoyo Torimitsu, who also appears in the film as the businessman's nurse/technician. Momoyo created the work as a commentary on the Japanese salaryman, but its new context outside the New York Stock Exchange works just as well, if not better. It feels emblematic of the recession era as a robotic businessman crawls on its belly towards redundancy on Wall St. It's a striking key image as he/its battery runs down in front of the Stock Exchange Building amongst oblivious pedestrians. Finally, the corporation soldier is carted off on a stretcher. Evidently the nurse's fix-up job on his bottom was not enough to fully repair his system error.