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| Northern Void |
Northern Void offers a glimpse of what the suburbs will be like in the future.
Taking a three kilometre strip of Preston as an emblematic environment of how life currently exists,
Northern Void transforms this locale into a gradually decaying dystopia of everyday collapse.
The video is divided into three sections - The Present (2013), The Future (2085) and The Post-Future (3079).
In The Future, sallow youth wait listlessly for trams that never come. Their skin glows grey despite darkened skies and billowing rainless clouds. Barren clay-infested earth surrounds decayed High Street shop facades. Scarred, ravaged, traumatized - yet strangely innocent, these youth appear to have stepped straight out of a bombed hospital ward.
In the Post-Future, they linger still: shimmering ghosts of the Australia that never came.
Devoid of dialogue and foregrounding a mix of landscape and portraiture,
Northern Void visually merges the hyper-banality of Northern urban peripheries with a foreboding quasi-futurism. Evoking 1950s Russian sci-fi and the suburban dystopia depicted in many Japanese manga,
Northern Void paints the future Western landscape as mired in an all-too-familiar present.
