This here figger tho it wernt like no other figger I ever seen. It wer crookit. Had a hump on its back and parper sewt in the clof. For a wyl I cudnt think what it myt be then when it come to me what it wer I cudnt hardly beleave it yet there it wer nor no mistaking it. It wer a hump and it wer meant to be a hump. The head wernt like no other head I ever seen in a show neither. The face has a big nose what hookit down and a big chin what hookit up and a smyling mouf. Some kind of little poynty hat on the head it curvit over with a wagger on the end of it.
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker, 1980
The eponymous hero of Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker trawls a post-apocalyptic landscape, collecting apocrypha about the nuclear experiment that destroyed civilisation, which he recounts in the mutated language of a twelve-year-old. Puppet shows have become the main means of disseminating stories and the power to perform them resides with two travelling players – the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer – a new establishment not so far removed from the old one. In a wilderness devoid of built structures, Riddley discovers an artefact buried in the mud that connects him to the past, a blackened figure of Mr. Punch, with the showman’s calloused hand still inside.
In Will Duke’s digital animation, We Fashioned the City on Stolen Memories, it is the hidden hand of the urban planner that has been severed. From a blank patch of ground, organic tower blocks burst with life, growing on their own volition, proximal stems reaching for concrete skies. Meaningless ledges breathe from blank façades and the lids of new-born windows ease themselves open to the light. A glimpse over the rooftops shows thousands of similar creatures being bred in unison as we are offered a grandstand view at the dawn of civilisation. And then, as quickly as they have bloomed, the seasons change and the buildings wilt and moult, shedding their details to shrink back into the earth, until they grow and die again in an endless feedback loop.
In this work and its title resides a world of frustration as the city rebuilds itself time after time according to the same parameters. In pixels of infinite potential, fantastic tetrahedrons flatten themselves to conform to finite reality, doomed to adopt their dull grey phenotype. Clad in hand-me-down ideas and laced with the failed utopia of the Modernist project, this is an indictment of humanity encumbered by a lack of vision.
When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted. Close your eyes for a moment, turn around to look at something else, and the thing that was before you is suddenly gone. Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you mustn’t waste time looking for it. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things, 1987.
Behind the scenes and all around floats the electromagnetic angst that fuels this inevitability. It is made flesh in A Nightmare of Meaningless without End, a prosaic rendering of sockets and fuses that flickers in the beam of a data projector to shed light on the original from which it has been copied. Trapped between the power source and its simulacrum, between the analogue and the digital, between being and nothingness, the visitor is a contemporary Crusoe, forced to contemplate existence. While the digital age spirals uncontrollably outside, a single plug trails its lead tantalisingly into the machinery, sending its doppelganger onto the wall opposite, suggesting it could all, so easily, be made to stop.
We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for the others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the peculiarities of the events we shared, and the repetition, the listening, is as if we are saying: ‘It was like that for you, too? Then that confirms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn't imagining things.’
Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974
© Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt 2005