Virtual Wastelands
Berlin, DE, 2021
Flight Simulator 2020, screen capture, analogue photography
Series of small prints and one extremely enlarged print
By using a virtual camera in the game Flight Simulator 2020, I travel through a hyper-real version of Berlin looking for its last wastelands. I am building archives of these temporary and disappearing spaces as I mourn the loss of emptiness in a city that is becoming more claustrophobic day by day.
The photogrammetry method used by Microsoft for its realistic representation of cities, uses real satellite images from around 2008, so many of Berlin’s former wastelands are still preserved in this old virtual version of Berlin. The technology is similar to that of Google Maps but has some advantages; you can fly through the world freely, choose weather, time of day and season, and you can take virtual photos, determine perspective, zoom factor, sharpness etc. and thus compose factual but somewhat distorted pictures of these landscapes as it was not possible before.
The wastelands, depicted with slightly washed-out but still high resolution 4K textures and coarse polygon architecture, may look kind of realistic at first glance but on closer inspection they become more adjacent to destroyed cityscapes and images of post-war rubble and a much older version of Berlin come to my mind. The existence of Berlin’s wastelands are actually often rooted within the troubled past of the city but at the same time the wasteland then became a space where potentials, dreams and ideas could be explored and thus this city became a magnet for artists and alternative people while others are still frightened by spaces that are not used in normative ways and are thus “wasted”.
All photographs are taken at home in front of a 4K television with a post-war analogue camera on a tripod (Leica M3, 1954). First I take a photo within the simulator by using the virtual camera function and then I photograph this resulting image off the screen with the analogue photo camera. The treacherous pixels and digital colors exposing the simulator are converted into organic analogue grain and chemical colors. The virtual world looks noticeably more organic and real. There is a dreamlike quality in taking photos of wastelands that do not exist anymore. The impossibility of taking a photo of the past has been bypassed and like the wasteland itself as a temporary urban anomaly, this way of taking photos in the city is a significant departure from traditional city photography
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