Empire Drive-in

For consecutive summers, New York City has had increasing offerings of outdoor film screenings. The locations range from parks, to restaurant backyards, to rooftops and beaches. Now, the concept has an added popular vintage twist: a drive-in.

Not just your usual run-of-the-mill drive-in, which in itself would be cool and intriguing enough, but Empire Drive-In is a junk car drive-in, upcycling wrecked cars rescued from junkyards and repurposing them as seats for audience members to climb into, and onto, while watching films projected on a 40-foot screen made of salvaged wood. 

The masterminds behind the project are Jeff Stark  and Todd Chandler. These two Brooklyn-based artists have previously created other Empire Drive-Ins, most recently last year at the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in Manchester, UK. Stark and Chandler, along with a team of other artists and craftspeople have set out, in this age of consumerism, to create a sense of possibility  by focusing on re-use, designing something new and special while salvaging and repurposing waste. 

In cleaning up the cars, which will have stereo audio transmitted via radio directly to each car, the crew found all kinds of interesting personal artifacts from car deodorizers to letters, which they have chosen to keep in the cars to “create a story”. This perhaps urges the audience to explore further the concept of "one man's trash is another man's treasure".