concrete island

"As we drive across a motorway intersection, through the elaborately signalled landscape that seems to anticipate every possible hazard, we glimpse triangles of waste ground screened off by steep embankments. What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveillance cameras?" J.G. Ballard, Introduction to Concrete Island, 1994

unregulated urban landscapes

"Destruction of communities (foreign and local) are lamented and eulogised in the songs that follow, culminating in the album closer: an ode to the empty railyard terrain adjacent to the neighbourhood where the band, along with many other Montreal musicians and artists, have lived for a decade or more. This land is now being swallowed up by big box and condo development. This is Our Punk-Rock... addresses the local/universal demise of uncontrolled and unregulated urban landscapes -- a demise that stretches from the docile walls of superstore complexes and protest 'pens' in the West to outright military surveillance, harassment and murderous 'surgical' strikes by Western-backed armies in South America and the Middle East."

the parking garage

"He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human. He encodes all this, or hardwires it, into the actual landscapes of his novels. You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form, on the scale of a whole civilisation." Geoff Manaugh, BLDBLG "Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind”. JG Ballard

death of affect

"As Marc Augé has said, ‘non places are the real measure of our time…. The airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets.’ ^[5] So the landscape of this utopia is dominated by unreal architecture, liminal zones of artificiality; and these regions of ontological uncertainty are dominated by an uncanny and perverse logic that manifests itself in both the landscape and the psyches of those contained within them- an unholy fusion of place and mind in which normalised notions of affective human relationships are distorted, undercut by the alienating environment."

Rick Mcgrath, Psychic Landscapes, Physical Environments