Entourage: Text Insert

ENTOURAGE aka Physical Distance Theory or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Videogames

I’ve been sitting, pondering how to write this for hours. I’m perched in my favourite café, a NZ Covid Tracer QR code crudely sellotaped to the window above my left shoulder. People fumble with phones as they approach to scan it, then enter and apply hand sanitiser at the counter. The faint smell of coconut cream mixed with cheap spirits hangs in the air. Night Fever by The Bee Gees plays on the sound system. Barry Gibb’s falsetto makes light of what everyone’s trying to avoid – no one wants another lockdown, let alone a giant stick shoved so far up the nose it scrapes the back of the eyeballs.

This is to say I’m distracted. Safe to say we’re all distracted, plus more than a little disappointed and frustrated by the way 2020 has unravelled. While in New Zealand we find ourselves in a lucky position compared to other countries – I must also acknowledge my own relative good fortune in safe, steady employment and good health – it’s hard not to lament the many opportunities and plans that have fallen by the wayside as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Speaking of my own disappointments – which may legitimately be labelled ‘first-world problems’ – during lockdown a major ten-year project fell through and several exciting exhibition and publication opportunities were curtailed.

Professionally speaking, coming in to 2020 I felt positive for having carved a straight and assertive road forward. By June, however, this road had morphed into something more akin to the maddening maze in Stanley Kubrick’s, The Shining. While certainly an over-the-top analogy used for the sake of a good yarn, constant forecasts of doom and gloom were hard to ignore, especially taken in combination with cabin-fever, mental and physical isolation and extreme ‘Zoom Fatigue’. Throw in a patchy internet connection that often made my link to the outside world tenuous at best, my mind began to play tricks.

All work and no play might have made Jack a dull (and extremely psychotic) boy during his self-imposed winter writer’s retreat, but by the end of

mandatory lockdown my mood swung wildly between moderately dispirited and wholly depressed. Like everyone, I asked myself, “How the hell did we all get here?”

Grappling with this question, I began to suffer bouts of insomnia. Rather than tossing and turning and keeping my wife, Lizzie, awake in bed, I’d surf the net and deep-dive endless info-rabbit holes via my laptop downstairs. Following a string of click-bait articles about Walt Disney’s interest in cryogenics one night, I found myself browsing a technology and entertainment website. I randomly clicked on an article about how video game director-cum-auteur Hideo Kojima had proven himself to have a knack for predicting the future within his game worlds. I didn’t know who Kojima was, but quickly learned he is best known for creating cult classic titles Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding.

Death Stranding takes place in a vast open world brought to its knees by a mysterious cataclysmic event. The whole game is centred around the simple task of reconnecting socially and geographically disparate communities. This is achieved by controlling the protagonist, Sam Bridges, whose sole task is to don PPE and courier essential-goods parcels across country. Sound familiar?

After piling ridiculously sized packages on Sam’s back at a depot, he sets out on foot to negotiate barren and vast landscapes almost completely void of human company. The chief gameplay mechanic has you wresting buttons in order to help steady Sam’s consignment and keep him balanced, while at the same time negotiating the world’s inhospitable terrain. As Sam plods along, you help him avoid tripping on rocks, sliding down hills and getting infected by sinister, unseen forces. Each time he falls over or finds himself in strife (with interdimensional ghosts, no less), cargo accumulates damage.

Completely wreck the contents of the cargo and there’s hell to pay. The fate of society rests in your humble hands, brave postmaster. It was while watching a gameplay video of Death Stranding that I impulse bought a PlayStation.

I figured if I was going to stay up until 4am each morning I might as well channel energy into something vaguely rewarding. Like helping Sam reconnect the world.

I should state that up until reading this article I held zero interest in videogames or science fiction and fantasy genres of entertainment, at least as an adult. The last videogame I remember enjoying was Super Mario World on Super Nintendo, which was released sometime back in the early 1990s. While a technical marvel of its time, the basic, blocky 2D side-scrolling characters looked positively pre-historic in comparison to the tour-de-force that is Death Stranding’s 3D open-world. Truth be told, however, when I graduated high school in 1998 I’d hoped to find a career in character animation for videogames or film. I signed up for art school with the dream of helping create such worlds for people to escape to – although I never in my wildest dreams imagined something as alive and immersive as seen in game worlds of today.

To give some context, being a very sickly teenager I spent a good portion of my adolescence bedridden. Not being afforded much direct participation in the ‘real world’ during that time, the simple characters and worlds contained on those rectangular Nintendo game cartridges became my quirky social-fantasy escape. With coloured pencils, I took to drawing self-portrait character modes referencing various game worlds. I went so far as to map a pixelated, muscle-bound alter-ego of myself in the style of Capcom’s Street Fighter II. This was long before I knew what the word avatar meant, let alone recognised how then cutting-edge digital spaces might present an opportunity for people like me to express a self-image free of bodily restriction. In short, the pixelated likeness I drew was god-like in physique, so very obviously the antithesis to my frail frame in reality. At the time, I think I was simply interested in seeing how convincing a character model of my own creation might look alongside

those of the game. In hindsight, however, I believe there was more than a little aspirational thinking going on too.

By now you might be wondering what the hell this has to do with the pictures presented within the accompanying booklet. It’s a good question, and I guess I’m taking the long road to paint something of a backdrop. Please bear with me…

My late-adolescent interest in videogames and character animation disappeared the day I began a photography workshop in my first year of art school.

At that point I was mostly recovered from illness, but sensing I needed prying out of my shell, my lecturer armed me with a Pentax K-1000 and a handful of 35mm film. I was told to use the camera as an excuse to talk with people and participate in the world: to step out from behind the safety of a computer screen and follow the wind, wherever it may blow me; to photograph and talk to people on the street while they went about their daily activities.

This well and truly pushed me outside of my comfort zone, but after two weeks of hard graft I managed to expose over three hundred images. It was a very basic project and the photographs in themselves weren’t particularly interesting, except I felt an extraordinary sense of accomplishment making them. Seeing so many faces staring out from workprints, I could identify lawyers, drainlayers, city councillors, taxi drivers, a Jewish Rabi, several middle-aged anarchists and more. I could even tell you their names. By the end of that two-week workshop my aspirational character design morphed from that pixelated Street Fighter II model to a likeness of me – as I stood then and there – holding a small SLR camera and sporting a good pair of walking shoes.

Skipping forward to 2017, I ordered a takeaway coffee from one of Christchurch’s many post-quake shipping container cafes. While waiting I found myself staring at an architectural render of a building proposed for the land on which I stood. My attention was at first fixed on the hyperreal colours, prototypical character figures – mostly white, successful business people getting in and out of fancy European cars and happy families smiling – an affluent, neo-colonialist vision to say the least. The logo of the major corporation responsible for such a vision of prosperity glowed at the top of the building.

Below it, a parody of the Apple logo, a silver silhouette of a pear with a bite out of it, was rendered on a shop window. Amused by the cast of characters crudely cut-and-pasted from stock photos into the scene, I was suddenly shocked to see an uncanny likeness of myself. The figure stood complete with my camera, well-worn Dr. Martens boots and black multi-pocketed photographer’s jacket. They also sported the same haircut and grey-chinned, short beard. I snapped a photograph of the detail with my iPhone and sent it to my wife. “Since when did you have your ear pierced? :-)” she replied.

Later that day I viewed the image on my laptop and got to thinking. First, about how fast the world around me was changing and the elitist future such images were selling all over Christchurch. I wondered what spaces I’d feel comfortable occupying within such an exclusive city. When streets I’ve walked countless times honing my skills as a photographer have been re-landscaped, when endless sterile glass facades stand tall and reflect blinding light, what spaces will be left to trigger memory? Will Christchurch even feel like home?

Second, with the image greatly magnified on screen I was reminded of those pixelated character sketches I’d once drawn. The print pattern of the figure not only resembled the building blocks of those crude alter-egos, but the image effectively placed a surrogate of me within an alternate space and time I held no desire to inhabit. As far-fetched as it sounds, I found this disturbing.

Like in a c-grade horror movie when a character spies themselves within an ominous historic photograph, I felt my grasp on reality loosen. In hindsight, this feeling was analogous to how I felt when watching doomsday news broadcasts during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic; as I also felt when living through the Christchurch earthquakes nearly ten years earlier. Again I asked myself, “How the hell did we all get here?” And again, I was unable to come up with an answer. Except to say, one person’s affirmation may well be another’s denunciation. In case I have not made myself clear, I felt these billboards verged on the latter.

In the world of architectural drafting, the word ‘entourage’ refers to people, plants, vehicles, fixtures, furniture and structures drawn to embellish a render of a building or site. After seeing what amounted to a surrogate of me that day, I began photographing tight crops of architectural and real estate billboards around Christchurch’s CBD. I used a cumbersome but ultra-high-resolution camera to capture every texture and detail of the printed surfaces as I found them. As I’d seen something of myself occupying one alternate reality, I wondered if I might find aspects of myself in others as well. While never becoming more than a casual side project, the images I made in this manner were crucial to helping me reconcile disparate feelings of grief and optimism I have long held for my home of Christchurch, particularly post-quake.

To explain, on a bad day I’d dream of going back in time to Vivace café; to have Tonto, the best barista in the world, bring Lizzie, Dad and me coffee after coffee – secretly switching me to decaf after my third – only to remember it was demolished in haste under emergency orders well before the inner-city cordons opened and people were allowed back in. Extrapolate the scope of such demolition work to almost every other building I remembered within the CBD and the origins of my grief should become abundantly clear.

However, on the other side of the coin, I have vivid memories of much of the old city feeling horribly rundown and oftentimes borderline derelict. While some new buildings may lack aesthetic or even functional grace, a good many have been designed with well-utilised social spaces at their heart. Once congested one-way streets have also been reconfigured with dedicated cycle, bus and walkways, plus a concerted effort has been made to encourage inner-city residential development and mixed-use living. In short, it’s inarguable the CBD is slowly becoming a more accessible and exciting place to live, socialise and work than ever before.

In other words, while I felt the billboards I photographed peddled a vision of material wealth and consumerism I struggled to relate to, after the last tiles are glued in place built environments inevitably take on a life mostly free of such abstract imaginings. At the end of the day, pragmatism dictates that the clean glass facades of office buildings become cluttered by computer and photocopier cables and the occasional wayward takeaway coffee cup will find itself lost and lodged between desk and window, what’s left of its contents dribbling slowly down the glass. Spaces therefore shift from existing in theory – in this case within an architectural draftsperson’s hermetic 3D-modelled world – to being real, lived-in places. As time passes the billboards fade; they accumulate bird shit and the scratchings or painted marks of taggers, then ultimately find their way into landfill. There, they are laid to rest in the company of waste accumulated during widespread demolition works ordered as part of the earthquake recovery. In the meantime, the city lives on and evolves.

During the early stages of earthquake recovery the descriptor ‘transitional’ emerged as something of a catch-all buzzword applied to any project, initiative or structure conceived to bridge – or fill, sometimes literally – a gap between what was and what might be. We were given a transitional cathedral, transitional container mall, transitional architecture festival,

transitional art galleries, transitional street furniture, transitional schools, transitional insurance policies and pay-outs and transitional healthcare services, to name a few. I always thought this word curious, as it implies definitive start and end points – a movement from A to B. The word may emphasise the time between, but ultimately there’s a point of termination at the end.

If history has taught us anything, however, it’s that such logic rarely follows in practice. This has proven especially true for the large-scale public works project that is Christchurch’s central city rebuild. You only have to note the oft-revised projected inner-city rebuild completion dates to get a sense of the confused trajectory of transition in this case.

This is all to say that at the end of level three lockdown, I put down my PlayStation controller (at least during daylight hours) and grabbed my walking shoes and camera out of the wardrobe. A bit like Sam Bridges in Death Stranding, I stumbled my way around mostly deserted streets with my heavy backpack pulling hard on the shoulder straps and with substantial tripod clasped in hand. On the rare occasion a fellow pedestrian approached, we’d give each other a wide berth and raise our eyebrows. Face masks made smiling redundant, but if Tyra Banks taught the world anything as host of America’s Next Top Model, it’s always good form to smize.

I had no plans of what to photograph, but all I’ve written about above kept knocking around at the back of my head. Eventually, I started setting up my tripod in places approaching my conception of how a cropped video game or architectural drafting screengrab might look if seen out of context from the bigger picture. I’d stand, sometimes for a few hours, waiting for people to enter the frame and somehow activate it; to help give the scene a sense of scale and depth or drama, but to also soften and give an ambiguous feeling of human connection or purpose to these places. For the vast majority of these images I managed to capture in a single exposure something that

came close to what I was thinking. Somewhat ironically, these are the ones I consider the most complex and surreal. For a few photographs, however, I’d wait and meticulously capture several images with people coming and going.

I’d work with the intention of combining these images later, wanting to subtly emphasise the nature of the place as I experienced or understood it. Either way, it was important the resultant work maintained a sense of faithfulness to place, if not time. In a way I was parodying the work I’d made photographing billboards. Only now I wasn’t trying to see myself in idealised renders, rather repopulate the here and now so I might recalibrate myself in relation to it.

My initial intentions for this booklet were not so grandiose and serious. After having exhibitions and projects cancelled, I simply wanted to gather some recent images together and send a kind of Christmas calling card out to people I admire and care about, or might have come in contact with had it not been for travel and social restrictions. Safe to say things spiralled out of control pretty quickly. I ended up editing together two otherwise disparate bodies of work-in-progress, printing fifty copies and writing some kind of convoluted mini-essay. This booklet is not intended as the definitive presentation of this work as it’s all part of an ongoing, multi-faceted project that has no end in sight. I do, however, feel it a fitting time to send it out into the world, in the hope it might build some (Sam) bridges. At the very least, with the tenthanniversary of the Christchurch earthquakes rapidly approaching, it might contribute something of worth to the discussion around how far, or not, the city has come.

Tim J. Veling

www.timjveling.com / www.placeintime.org