Capital Cities consists of 4 digital film loops examining Tokyo and Londons transportation lines.

In Capital Cities, I have focused on how London and Tokyo, seemingly unlike areas, share cross cultural histories via transit development. For instance, during the Meiji period the Emperor of Japan commissioned English and German engineers to construct rail systems for Tokyo. The Japanese railway is therefore based on European architectural and transit models. Ironically, cross-cultural hybridization can reverse in time. The new Docklands development is an indirect import from the East. The system engineering draws from Japanese models and the architecture from Malaysia.

Capital Cities creates new typological info-systems, wherein viewers are left to examine details and not labels in order to identify each point of transit. Markers and signifiers are reduced so that location becomes irrelevant and the viewer consumes the image on a more immediate or mundane level, similar to the rapid scanning attention of someone on a daily commute.

The level of ambiguity of the image helps frame a discourse about social migration and supermodernist architecture in which temporary holding spaces for the workers and commuters become universal and non-descript. This questions one's position within the grid of a modern transportation system and, likewise, within an urban city scheme that symbolizes a new gentrification of subcultural zones.