INTRODU. red sky generation
I’m playing as a rebellious photographer hanging out on the roof of a Highrise with their mates. Estimate 1km away from us the NATO-owned mechs are fighting their kaiju-like enemy in front of a blood-red sky, it’s not a pretty sight. I take a picture with a wide lens facing away from the catastrophe and capturing the skyline of Tauranga, New Zeeland.
G:\footage\UmarangiGeneration_Photography\MauauViewNight\Photo39458410.png
In post, I add bloom and adjust the hue of the landscape to emulate a blue sky.
An unnamed/unknown (in-game) entity bought the picture, it doesn’t seem like they looked at it.
Cheapscapes
Umarangi Generation formalistically is a photography videogame with handcrafted levels portraying cyberpunk-inspired urbanist zones in which you can explore and interact with the world using your camera. It is a sandbox with total artistic freedom. I used this freedom to capture the outskirts of these levels or the landscapes surrounding them.
Urban landscape photography has gotten a connotation with dull and boring.
Framed New York skylines as filler in Ikea showrooms, another black and white Westminster Bridge poster and an aerial shot of Paris as a place holder in a picture frame. They have helped to turn (urban) landscape photography into a neo-liberal cheapscapes1 , a landscape in which every stubborn disruption is removed. Signifying that everything (even the biggest of cities) is in stasis, the same as it ever was. The stasis of a specific kind of city, a city of glass monoliths in which the riches of the rich stoically shape the world to their desired image..
This connotation with cheapscapes photography that the urban landscape photo has undermines the potential of the urban landscape as a poor image.
“The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audio-visual economies.”2
Around every corner of a street in any metropolis, you can find a graffiti tag, an overflowing bin or a homeless person. Entities that disrupt the mythos of the neo-liberal metropolis.
“I had forgotten that landscape photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one” (- Patrick Keiler on Robbinson in ruins)3
Landscape photography’s political potential resides in the same emptiness that resides in its cheapscape counterpart. This emptiness manifests itself differently though, instead of removing the layer of urban noise by clever framing and editing it instead makes the noise part of the urban backdrop itself. Creating an empty layer that can be filled with haunting pasts or lost futures of the city.
The twisting of the hue does precisely this, not just changing something to the image, it adds to it. A bond between the image now and its past. A melancholic hope for the return of a blue sky that haunts the people still living in near-future Tauranga.
What is absent in the scenery can be filled with critiques of the space, desires or hope.
“Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun and distraction.”4
CONCLU. Burning bushes
The developer of Umarangi Generation, Tali Faulkner, is a Māori person who watched his mother’s house burn down in the 2020 bushfires. The only sky he saw for weeks was a blood-red sky. He made the game in the 6 months following that. By most measurements, it is unfished, thousands of glitches, reused assets and empty corners but it doesn’t matter. He filled its landscapes with so much pain, hate and hope it overshadows any possible technical criticism.
The layers upon layers present in the game create a staircase, a staircase to a door, a door that leads to a hallway, a hallway of potential, a potential for a new, better future.
Now it is our turn, let’s add layers, combine layers, photoshop them in your will and create a landscape of thousands of cheapscapes burning to the ground, every glass monolith melting under its own tension.
An unsustainable world must not be sustained.
One must imagine London burn.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Faulkner, Tali: Umarangi Generation, New Zeeland 2020
Steyerl, Hito: In Defence of the Poor Image, New York 2009
Fisher, Mark: Ghost Of My Life, London 2014
NOTES
1 Cheapscape: A landscaping scheme that incorporates rock, mulch, and plantings that, once in place, require little or no further expense, upkeep, or work such as watering or mowing, thus saving the owner time and money. A combination of landscape and cheapskate. (From urban dictionary)
2
3 Fisher, Mark: Ghost Of My Life (p226)
4Steyerl, Hito: In Defence of the Poor Image (p6)