Strange Imaginary Games
RND/ To consider scenes from the two dimensional city – featuring virtual photography from LOTUS-simulator. Images via Steam Community – 1920 x 1080 .jpg: This pervasive feeling of flatness, of an uncanny space without depth – that the whole of this videographic reality is painted on or projected onto a vast, two dimensional screen. An … Read more
RND/ In which you consider a low polygon city of your virtual dreams: 3440 x 1440 .jpg, 64 dithered colors – original images via unknown gamedev on Twitter We find ourselves in a historical moment of pervasive mediocrity. Fuelled by basic human drives – flights from death and boredom – the new technologies, bright and … Read more
RND/ To consider a painting of Dead Land America. Featuring three scenes from Land Of The Dead (Dir. George A. Romero 2005) – 3166 x 3994 .jpg So we pour it in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around … Read more
RND/ In which European bus simulator videogame OMSI 2 appears to symbolize the abstract virtual poverty (emptiness, barely adequate structural existence, barren aridity etc.) of the everyday mundane world.) Some PC screenshot (virtual photography) art, via Steam Community: 1920 x 1080 .jpg One has to ask – if one were so inclined – what exactly … Read more
RND/ To consider various odd in-game scenes of virtual urban tension in Sub Rosa (PC): 1920 x 1080 .jpg – edited images via Steam Community Example Reference Links Bullet-Time in Simulation City: Revisiting Baudrillard and The Matrix (PDF) Designing Buildings Wiki – Living in the hyperreal post-modern city Eric Randall Morris – Hyperreality : On … Read more
RND/ To consider what Postmodern Internet Theorist Robert What calls ‘that special shine’ – the feeling of acute Baudrillardian Hyperreality, often experienced (say) when viewing footage of videogames being played on television screens. That this ‘special shine’ somehow symbolically indicates the possibility that modern reality as we remotely we imagine we understand it is already … Read more
RND/ To imagine paintings of ‘superbrutal’ megastructures – so termed, because they seem to go beyond regular Brutalism. Images via https://escapismgame.wordpress.com/ 3840 x 4008 .jpg — Example Reference Links Imaginary Megastructures New York Megacity Morning Verticality Dark Synth series: images of Dead Cyberpunk-Vision Cities Megastructural Photoshop Remix of Gustav Wunderwald Abstract Encounter: The House … Read more