Gareth Damian Martin, The Continuous City, 2018

The Continuous City is a photographic series by British artist, writer, and game designer Gareth Damian Martin that explores the interplay between architecture and computer games. Comprising two hundred photographs, The Continuous City features game buildings and infrastructure captured through the use of analog 35mm black and white film. These images are projected via a DLP projector, merging the realms of digital urban space and the traditional medium of architectural photography. This technique creates spaces that are ambiguous and subtly surreal, prompting viewers to question the reality of what they are seeing.

The project engages in a double mediation process – from the computer graphics of the game that simulate the buildings to the analogue photographs of the game screens – thereby transforming the architecture into a virtual image. This dual-layered representation highlights the illusory nature of architectural forms within video games, challenging the viewer’s perception of physical urban spaces. By doing so, The Continuous City underscores the notion that the urban experience in video games is an elaborate construct, a fabricated environment that both mirrors and distorts real-life cities.

The photographic series spans several different games, including GTA V, presenting a fluid, ever-changing urban landscape. These environments are rendered uniform through the use of black and white, high ISO grainy film photographs, which add a cohesive texture and tone to the images. This homogenization disrupts the viewer’s initial recognition of the scenes, revealing the familiar views of cityscapes as imaginary, composed of disparate elements from various and disconnected game worlds.

Furthermore, The Continuous City pays homage to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a literary work that explores urban spaces through fantastical and fictional narratives. Just as Calvino's book constructs cities from imaginative descriptions, the artist’s photographic series constructs an impossible collective architecture from the fabricated environments of video games. Through this project, Gareth Damian Martin invites viewers to reconsider the nature of urban spaces, both virtual and real, and to reflect on the boundaries between them.

More by Gareth Damian Martin: jumpovertheage.com