RND/ to consider several imaginary, somehow culturally computationally-parallel megastructures:
Abandoned Arcology Hyperstructure
Example RND Statement via Robert What: accidental homage to Masdar City on Earth.
3072 × 3456 .jpg, remix of old Doom textures
An abandoned arcology hyper-structure, recently rediscovered floating on orbit around ZX84 in the Tramodine System.
With its signature 27,000 mile high walls of impenetrable black nano diamond, intricately patterned with outlines of once fertile rice fields – no records remain of this once classically designed (yet now mysteriously empty) megacity.
It’s the fourth such wall found in as many years; Big Scientists are now suspicious.
As for the life forms who once lived there – their culture and ultimate fate still remains unknown / unknowable.
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Atmosphere Processor
3072 × 1920 .jpg, via screenshot from Aliens (1986, James Cameron)
Imagine a vast post industrial processor of ambient, lo-sci-fi atmosphere manufactured by Weyland Corporation – where researcher Billy Fanward works as cheap Renta-Ultraborg security.
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Blue Blade Megacity
3072 × 1728 .jpg, via screenshots from Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Fusing two iconic images from movie.
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CN Tower, Toronto
3072 × 3072 .jpg, remix of Caitlin Cronenberg photo
Remix of album cover by some awful industry rapper; an arresting image of ‘towering’ monolithic power – raw designer bleakness, desolate and oppressive – an artificially brooding mega-structural erection to hyper narcissism – an alternative, doubly inverted retro Sci Fi take.
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Coogans Bluff Megastructure
3072 × 2592 .jpg, montage of screenshots from Coogan’s Bluff (1968, Don Siegel)
Watch as it zooms out to a global megascale architectural power dynamic; ‘Maximum Amerika’ as pre stressed cultural concrete monolith.
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One Percent Tower
3072 × 1728 .jpg, via screenshot of anime Highlander: Search For Vengeance (2007, Yoshiaki Kawajiri)
Example Artist Statement via Robert What: So welcome to the impossibly distant Now – where a 1% tower stands alone, immovable – as much symbolic death wish as megastructure. Hidden in plain view among the ongoing post apocalyptic destruction of (/the idea of) the future, such super image expresses uncommon chronotropic hyper dreamlike feelings without name or label. To consider this image as an expression of ‘visual language’ expressing strange virtual experience – a hot heavy day spent hiding among dusty ruins.
Your throat is parched; you look up from your desperate life and a monumental vision suddenly looms, set against the immortal mechanical sky of a certain peculiar and disquieting shade. Feel that the tower is never quite reachable, but rather reaches out to dominate the surrounding planetary blandscape, making itself the crushingly still, horribly off yellow centre of the new undead world. Total godlike domination – a profound and totalizing uselessness. Slow, sick birds wheel listless in the high thermal updrafts. Occasionally bodies culturally disregarded by those who exist – not live – in tower, can be seen falling from it – exploding silently at the base after a long free fall.
No words are available here in this non place. The air is hot and dry, and you’re forever thirsty – yet only the flat and terrifyingly banal ‘ecstasy of gold’ exists.
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Prey 2 Megacity
3072 × 1728 .jpg, remixed Prey concept art
Smeary, faded megacity dreams of a long ‘AAA industry’ abandoned videogame, which, even on virtual paper easily urinates on the modern Prey based product.
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Terra Nullius
3072 × 3901 .jpg, Flickr image remix via Lee Sie
An ‘abstract encounter’ /research space potentiality; Terra Nullius – nobody’s land
To consider the mythic lore and strange narrative surrounding and arising out of (/ the concept of) an ancient, super massive smart concrete flyover of near infinite span: a vast highway overpass, set in an ontological desert wilderness devoid of life, except for giant manta rays, a few lonely crows and some hallucinogenic, electric blue fungus which grows in the sad skeletal eye sockets of unknown humanoid creatures dotted around the landscape. Apparently this space was regularly traversed by orderless ascetic medieval-style monks for contemplative purposes, who walked its endless lengths in state of silent uncanny wonderment until they died of sheer fascination, upon which ir were unceremoniously thrown over the side, often dissolving in the air (such were the heights involved.)
They would also climb up the huge support columns with their bare hands in obsessive attempts to reach ‘higher’ levels – a feat which would often take days at a stretch – whenever they would fall however, they would not die but simply awake on several, highly frustrating levels lower than their fellow travellers. Their journey was made more difficult by accumulated piles of wind blown sand at each support base – which were actually sand coloured nurdles [1]
A remarkably picture of this megastructure was discovered by hyper-modern researchers in a dusty, legendary illuminated codex, scratched paper texture and time – a pale grimoire for evoking the undying. According to initial interpretations of the book’s heavily codified texts and marginalia, the monks invented a bizarre story that the overpass originally existed to transport immense sentient machines from an ancient cosmic war, themselves on an epic collective quest of spiritual redemption.
In a somewhat foolhardy line of research, players plan to call out to the medieval dead monks – allow their ghosts to enter their bodies on the astral plane, in order to be transported to the overpass (note the appearance of the skulking Skull King in the Terra Nullius logo / logos)
Strangely no food or water is needed here – despite the constant clawing feel of hunger and thirst. To experience Terra Nullius is to immerse oneself in troubled appreciation of incorporeal architectural foreboding – to witness the slow sounds of blood warm wind, the lethargic whale like song of the giant rays which echo blankly off the dull, generally smooth, hard sides of this inconceivable and ‘out landish’ concrete forest. This quietly uncultivated and introspectively barbarous un-territory.
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Example Reference Links
// how to play big science