Simulated Cities

I picked up an old postcard…

it was a thrift store find, of a town I had never visited. A snapshot of a city I didn’t recognize, taken long before I was born. The buildings, cars, and human shaped smudges seemed real enough, I thought—a mundane moment of reality preserved on a flimsy card meant to make the viewer envious.

The longer I stared, tracing the outlines of the various shapes with my eyes and eventually fingers, the more I began to wonder what else was happening the day the photo was taken. What fell beyond the boarders, unworthy of being included in the final edit? I could visualize the structures and cars cut off by the edge of the card easily enough, but what came next? More buildings, if I chose it. Or perhaps another row of cars.

An entire city began to assemble in my mind, a world that never existed—arranged fragments of memory, recollections of the past, pieced together to fabricate a landscape—all born from a humble postcard. Eventually, the tiny 4”x6” piece of card stock had become lost in a sea of distorted buildings and crooked streets that occupied the space between the real and the imaginary.

I placed the postcard back on the shelf, exhausted and content with what was real. My time as a city planner had come to an end, and with its conclusion, so too did the invisible city.

The images above are, at most, 40% real. Each image was created with a photograph I took as its foundation. Then, using a generative expansion program, the images were iterated over themselves as many times as the program could handle. The more the program had to reconcile its creation, the more the image began to collapse into indiscernible mush. The program was no more powerful than my imagination.