Ever-obsessed with control,  our globe is increasingly littered with environments that we have created to give the appearance of wonder, flaunt our dominion over nature and break the boundaries of reality.  But these ‘hyper-real’ habitats, far from being places of joy, can also be viewed as the constructs of despair, as dystopian enclaves.

 

Media traditionally depicts dystopias as dark, monotone places, with decay and detritus everywhere, the dregs of civilisation living on a metaphorical precipice.  But a dystopia could just as easily be formed in a world full of light and colour if the underlying reality is simply a falsehood, the construct a gaudy facade designed to blind us to an unpalatable truth.  

 

The images here (taken in Southern California) imagine a ‘hyper-topia’, a world where ‘reality’ has been pushed to an extreme, creating chilling graphic novel-style cityscapes and dreamlike urban settings, that hide the true state of our existence.  

 

The process of creating these images purposefully employs extensive manipulation at every stage.  They begin life as infra-red photographs.  These are then subjected to extreme post-processing before being merged together in movie creation software to create the final result.  This methodology is as much a comment upon humanity’s desire to control, hide and re-purpose reality as the final images themselves.