influences, art statement

Simcity. SNES version

SimTower. 1994. PC

Andreas Gursky. Montparnasse. 1993. 206x406cm

Callum Morton. Habitat

To illustrate the life-society I live in is by a framework, the structure of walls which symbolize an inhabited setting, a blank canvas that is coloured by the shifting thoughts that occur in its space over time.

As the narrative unfolds in a commercial television series, film, novel, etc. the stories are integrated into fictional locations, which the viewer builds and pieces together as they save mental images and repeatedly link and relate them - they become imagined cities, universes which can be as much real as our grasp of the physical world we exist in, and by extension the imagined/hidden spaces- partitioned/obstructed we experience everyday.

The elevator which navigates high-rise building contains the idealisms of vertical travel. Of the elevator shaft, the dark empty space above and below remains imagined, the tenant does not see outside of the container. The doors close and when they open a new place is entered- one comes familiar with an experience like teleportation.

Consider the tenants of a high rise building and their understanding of the structure; they exist above and below floors which they have never set foot in, the incomplete picture they have of the building is formed by few rooms they may have occupied. An entire understanding of the tower can only exist in the collective minds of a multitude of tenants, while an omniscient intelligence understands the entire structure. The lobby and the elevator systems are the common hubs, whereas personal private places occupy a mostly imagined space.

For an omniscient intelligence to view the entire structure through the experience, memory, imagination of all the organisms it contains, there must be masses of individuals existing within for the image of the structure to be complete.

This is my attraction to the patterns found in inhabited environment, the uniform grids and box systems which contain narratives and metaphors, the psychological state of existence in the structure and its function as man made organism.