Environment Built for Absence (an Unofficial/Artificial Sequel to J.G. Ballard’s “High Rise”)

• Tivon Rice
• [email protected]
• Department of Digital Art and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle, US

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Photogrammetry, Digital Storytelling, Urbanism, Science Fiction.

Returning to the Dutch statistics building, I imagined many ways of seeing this empty concrete shell. The train, reconfigured as a motorized camera on rails, provided one kind of image: a repeated panorama from right to left, channeling the penultimate scene from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. But perhaps a different kind of prosthetic vision would give me access to the complete picture.

Each month over the duration of the following year, I exited the train and walked to a hilltop across from the building (in Holland, a 15 meter-high mound is sufficient to be considered a hilltop). From there, an automated drone loaded with GPS coordinates followed a repeated pattern above the site, capturing 250 images each time. This specific photographic program – the flight path, the tilt of the camera, the exposure, the overlap of each image – effectively scanned the entire grounds, and over the course of 2018 created an archive of 3D models documenting the structure’s slow collapse.

What did these photogrammetric images represent? From the train and from the drone, I observed this fenced-off section of the city from a distance. Back at my studio, however, I could remotely explore the building from the ground up – zoom in, look around corners, enhance. A virtual camera on the first floor provided closeup details of concrete rubble and piles of broken windows accumulating beneath the exterior. A wide-angle camera above the model framed the path of the excavator’s movements on the top floor. I could see the residue of the demolition crew’s labor, but the scenes were completely absent of any human form (photogrammetric scans generally won’t capture moving objects such as people, cars, or trees blowing in the wind). This absence and the hollowness of the gutted building were echoed by the logic of the 3D renders – glitchy surfaces with only an implication of presence or solid structures beneath.

As I continued to explore these empty virtual spaces, I found my internal narration once again assuming the voices of filmmakers and authors – artists who conjured similar images in their work, and thus impacted my perception of said images. The concrete, the building, and the desolate grounds all registered as settings for some unwritten Ballardian novel. How did J.G. Ballard craft such environments while exploring the psychological effects of urban decay, impending climate catastrophe, or social isolation in future landscapes? How would Ballard’s ghost navigate this terrain?

Not intending to directly answer these questions, but rather to investigate the mediatic voices that lurk around the periphery of my thoughts, I proceeded by training an Artificial Intelligence system to speak like J.G. Ballard. [1]

Notes

1. A detailed description of Environment Built for Absence was recently published for Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture, and Design: A.I. at Urban Scale.