I found this interesting article over at Greylodge:
On the Edge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and Hong Kong's Cityscape by Wong Kin Yuen. It goes into detail about how the disjunctive architectural style and conflicted identity of Hong Kong as a post-colonial city has influenced science fiction design, using
Blade Runner and
Ghost in the Shell as examples.
The article caught my interest right away as the unconventional design and visuals of those two films have had a big influence on the way I design my own landscapes. The immediate contrast between high technology and traditional, more lived-in spaces in the environments of
Blade Runner and
GITS is a type of dynamic that I always find myself moving toward, the idea of a space where multiple identities and histories conflict, or adapt and flow into one another.
I've never been to Hong Kong, but Yuen's description of the city, particularly its Times Square area, is fascinating:
"The complex itself, built on top of a busy metro station, stretches from several levels underground to skyscraper height, looking down on the adjacent, much older buildings, "indifferent to its surrounding" (Abbas 1996, 221). For city-planners, especially visitors, the awkward and abrupt sense of discrepancies on all levels is impossible to miss. The complex was built on a former tram-depot skirted by an oldstyle street market and the quarters for lower echelon tram-company employees. Thus an area once inhabited by comparatively low-income locals has been transformed by commercialism into a high-tech wonder, a bewildering collage of signs and patterns with enough anarchic elements remaining (a small part of the market and old style shops) to create a sense of pastiche." (page 4)
This article was written in 2000, so I imagine the place must be fairly different today. It would be interesting to learn if the area has become more homogenized in the decade since or if it has retained its character as described above. At any rate, it's no wonder that such a place has provided the influence upon science fiction and imaginative design as it has. Yuen describes how Hong Kong's unique interplay of conflicting identities has helped shape it as a type of place without precedent in urban design; this "otherworldly" quality has made it an ideal muse for those who seek to create worlds different from our own.
Yuen goes into much more detail about post-modernism and identity, as well as the political details defining Hong Kong's history, but the idea that the city's design leads me toward is that of an urban environment that seems to almost mirror a natural ecosystem. An area where the overall layout is not planned by any one group but rather evolves over time into a hybridized environment, rich with conflict but using the fact to its advantage. A place where one might find age-worn superstructures supporting oblivious new designs. Historic buildings reconfigured and appropriated by new inhabitants. Levels of urban infrastructure that evoke geological strata, revealing the intertwining paths of time.
I feel this type of "disjunctive" infrastructure design corresponds well with my chosen medium, since it is a fact that no matter how much effort I put into making my photocomposites appear seamless, it remains that they are ultimately comprised of entirely different scenes reconfigured into a single whole. Individual photographic layers correspond to the conflicting layers of architecture that they depict. In the end, my composition represents thematically something similar to what it is made up of: a setting in which independent components collide, retaining references to their origin yet merging into something singular, a new creation.
