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Jamie’s World
Jamie Kinroy
MFA Thesis Supporting Paper
Faculty Committee members: Clarence Morgan, Jenny Schmid, James Boyd Brent
Department of Art, University of Minnesota
April 2014
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My work is rooted in comics, which I read fervently as a kid, and emulated
in my own graphic narratives. Early comic-‐creations of mine, such as “ The
Badass Chicken Biker” and “The Secret Life of Dustbins”, were the harbingers of
my current work. Stylistically and conceptually, my drawings and prints still
owe much to comics, graphic novels and other modern visual storytelling
mediums, like film and cartoons. I am most attracted to the capacity that all of
these formats have to construct detailed, immersive worlds. However, my own
work functions differently in terms of narrative.
While my medium (drawing / printmaking) is closely related to comics,
my work rejects sequential illustration, ‘plot’ or single narratives, and is focused
solely on intricately designed locations or environments. The images work
together in the aim of building a comprehensive picture of a personal urban
cosmology, an imagined but contemporary and global city, built out of my
influences and lived experience of a range of places – Scotland, Minneapolis,
Japan. As with any city, real or imagined, the potential for narrative is infinite. I
am the illustrator, architect, urban planner and set designer, but not the
storyteller. My images present open-‐ended environments that are not tethered
to a single narrative.
Open world environments of the current generation of videogames (for
example, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V) speak to me
powerfully as spaces of infinite narrative potential, in which, increasingly,
players can invent their own story. Narrative and game-‐play are limited only by
the player’s imagination. I see my images as functioning most similarly to
videogames in the way that I construct immersive space and environments, but
the player / viewer takes on the role of character/actor and director/storyteller.
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My work aims for the possibility that viewers might put themselves in and
imaginatively navigate the spaces I construct.
‘There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been just one of them’
Narrator, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).
When I was fourteen I read Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga tour-‐de-‐force, Akira
(1982-‐1990). The book, set in ‘Neo-‐Tokyo’, was a landmark graphic exploration
of postmodern urbanism, dealing with themes of technology, density,
architectural flux, youth alienation, and urban isolation. While the written
narrative is sprawling and amazingly complex, the artwork maintains an
equilibrium. Otomo’s drawing is executed with such care and elegance, as to
allow him to construct, and situate the narrative and themes within a truly
immersive world. You can open on any one of Akira’s 2000+ pages and lose
yourself in the environment through which the action is moving. The
environment’s intricacy creates the overwhelming sensation that the main plot is
just one of many stories taking place in Neo-‐Tokyo, albeit an important one. With
Akira, Otomo told one of the richest and most complicated stories ever to be
realised in the comic-‐book format, but -‐ perhaps even more amazingly -‐ he built
an imaginary world with a level of such excruciating precision and beauty as to
make it almost tangible to his audience.
There are other epics of graphic fiction that function similarly,
constructing detailed worlds, and achieve a unity of story and art, for example
Nausicaa of the Valley of The Wind (1982-‐1994) by Hayao Miyazaki, The Incal
(1981-‐1988) by Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Frank Miller’s The Dark
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Knight Returns (1986). These works have also exerted a significant influence on
me. However, I do not aim to tell a grand narrative, but am interested more in
liberating an imaginary, hand drawn world from a single story.
Along with Akira, the 1982 cult film Blade Runner fundamentally
reshaped the way I perceived and thought about the urban reality around me,
and my position in it. Blade Runner’s L.A. 2019 was at once alienating,
nightmarish, but familiar and awe-‐inspiring. With an undertow of romanticism
the film puts a cast on an aesthetic of post-‐industrial bleakness. Blade Runner is
celebrated amongst fans for its visual beauty – the aesthetic was rendered with
an astonishing, kaleidoscopic level of detail. Like Akira, the film allows the
viewer to look beyond the narrative arc of the main action, at the choreography
of spaces, and their wealth of detail. Blade Runner, though, takes this a step
further. Director Ridley Scott had a reputation for film environments that were
sumptuously layered, complex in design, and played a far more active role than
mere background. Scott Bukatman explains how in Alien (1979) “the
environment of the film became its most potent site of meaning” (Bukatman
1997, 19) and that similarly, “the brilliance of Blade Runner … is located in its
visual density. Scott’s layering effect produces an inexhaustible complexity, an
infinity of surfaces to be encountered and explored” (Bukatman 1997, 8). Indeed,
detail on the sets of Blade Runner bordered on the ridiculous, with instructions
on ‘electrified’ parking meters, and individually designed magazines on the racks
of street vendors’ stalls (Sammon 1997). Cult Cyberpunk writer William Gibson
explains how
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“Scott understood the importance of information density to perceptual
overload. When Blade Runner works best, it includes a lyrical sort of information
sickness, that quintessentially modern cocktail of ecstasy and dread” (Gibson
Webb, 1996, 45).
The intricate mise-‐en-‐scene in Blade Runner was the blueprint for a
generation of dystopian science fiction in film and comics and the genesis of the
emerging aesthetics of ‘Cyberpunk’. To some extent, my images adhere to
Cyberpunk’s visual style, most significantly to the idea of ‘information density’. I
have a commitment to rendering each image – each space -‐ with an extreme level
of detail, in order to overwhelm, but also to hint at a broad wealth of untold
narratives and untold complexities. I work under the principle that the richer the
detail of an encountered environment, the broader and more fertile its narrative
possibility. The idea of reading stories from an environment’s marginalia is
neatly reduced for me in Hitchcock’s film Rear Window (1952). In the film,
voyeur L.B. Jefferies (and the viewer) are able to conjecture endless narratives of
near infinite possibility from the scrutiny of minute details, such as objects on
windowsills, and partially obscured views of distant apartments and their
contents.
Scott Bukatman describes how Ridley Scott’s vision of urbanity in Blade
Runner is heavily indebted to the imaginings of French comics artist Moebius,
which showed cities with a kind of ‘unbounded’, or infinite, urbanism. In the
urban worlds of Moebius, “the only constant was the view that revealed
everything in a single glance; a view both panoramic and kaleidoscopic”
(Bukatman 1997, 45). Similarly, in Blade Runner, a view that shifts through
different levels of scale, from city-‐wide panoramas, to ground level street action,
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to the interiors of buildings and rooms, creates the overwhelming impression of
infinite complexity. Bukatman posits the idea that Blade Runner defines the city
as ‘fractal geography’. Fractal spaces are characterized by “infinite
fragmentation, and by similarities across different scales – fractal forms such as
coastlines or cloud patterns reveal equal complexity at any magnification, so ‘a
fractal is a way of seeing infinity’.” He continues, “Blade Runner reveals the city
itself to be a complex, self-‐similar space – a fractal environment. The panoramic
camera panned across the spaces of the city, but the fractal camera also tracks
through endless levels of scale… Infinite complexity structures urban reality”
(Bukatman 1997, 58-‐59).
Shifting perspective and scale is an approach that I use in my work in an
attempt to create a view that is overwhelmed by a sense of totality. Each of my
drawings allows exploration of a specific space within the same imaginary city.
In effect, they are views of the city magnified to different scales.
Fig. 1: Jamie’s World Jamie Kinroy, photolithograph, 8 x 11.5” (2012)
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For example, Jamie’s World (fig. 1) shows a panoramic view, perhaps several city
blocks, which takes in entire buildings, road systems and other mega structures:
the perspective of the architect, urban planner or video-‐gamer (as in Sim City) -‐ a
view of control. Tiny details – rooms and their contents, on a miniature scale –
can be seen in the windows. (Fig. 2)
Fig. 2: Jamie’s World (detail) showing rooms on miniature scale
Conversely, Hotel Rich (fig. 3) shows a ground level, first-‐person human
perspective of a hotel lobby. Connections can be drawn between the tiny rooms
visible in Jamie’s World and the detailed interior shown in Hotel Rich. I aim for
the impression that Hotel Rich may exist within Jamie’s World – a ‘zoomed in’
view of a specific fragment of the structure. Other images, for example Oriental
Kitchen Freeway Crash and Chinese Kitchen also have close parallels, in micro,
inside Jamie’s World. Hopefully, such parallels create the sensation that if you
were to ‘open a hatch’ or ‘zoom in’ through any of the windows in Jamie’s World,
an equal level of detail and complexity would be revealed – “infinite complexity
structures urban reality.”
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Fig. 3: Hotel Rich Jamie Kinroy, photolithograph, 9 x 12” (2013)
This shift between the whole and its components – between macro-‐
worlds and micro-‐worlds, happens across the body of drawings, but it also
happens within the drawings. For example, a detail from The Chinese Kitchen
(fig.4) shows a mini-‐world based around a flowerbed. Stray cats are lounging
amongst trash-‐strewn plant systems dotted with rusting bicycles, abandoned
lawn chairs, broken glass and maneki-‐neko (Japanese ‘beckoning cat’ figurines).
It is a micro-‐world in itself, but it is also a small part of the macroscopic whole
space of The Chinese Kitchen (fig. 5). Like the probing camera in Blade Runner, the
viewer’s eye can shift back and forth across scale, between the flower-‐bed mini-‐
world (as well as other micro environments in the piece) and the environment in
its totality. These shifts in the perception of the image go some way to explaining
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the critical importance of detail. Mundane detail is hand drawn with the same
care and attention as overarching structure, resulting in ‘fragmenting’
perspectives of overwhelming clarity.
Fig. 4: The Chinese Kitchen (detail) showing the plant-‐bed microworld
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Fig. 5: The Chinese Kitchen Jamie Kinroy, graphite, 22 x 30” (2013)
My ideas about the secret functions of marginalia and mundane details
were further informed by exploration of video-‐game environments. These
curious topographies interest me as spaces, sets, or environments for narratives
to take place.
In the psychological stealth / horror game Manhunt (2003), detail plays a
subliminal role in setting up the tone or atmosphere of its spaces. The premise is
extreme. Manhunt takes place in the fictional Carcer City -‐ a “run down, broken
rust belt town” in middle America. Players take control of James Earl Cash, a
death row inmate who is abducted before execution. As Cash, you are thrown
into a nightmarish ‘game’, orchestrated by a mysterious figure known only as
‘The Director’. Over the course of a night you must navigate abandoned sections
of Carcer City that have been closed off into ‘levels’. The director explains to you,
via an earpiece that in order to win your freedom you must follow his
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instructions. The areas are being patrolled by a series of increasingly dangerous
and deranged gangs, who have been instructed to hunt you down. In order to
make it through each ‘level’ alive, you must pick off the gang members, one by
one, murdering them with whatever makeshift weapons you can get your hands
on – from plastic shopping bags, and bits of barbed wire, to shards of glass and
baseball bats. The ‘action’ is being recorded on CCTV, the director explains, for
his snuff-‐film enterprise. Typical game-‐play involves sneaking, hiding in
shadows, back alleys, underneath cars or in bushes and waiting for the
opportune moment to strike.
Unsurprisingly, Manhunt was controversial. Whether its depiction of
graphic violence and inhumanity causes offense or not, what it does beautifully is
to present players with wonderfully detailed and atmospherically intense
environments, or ‘sets’, that capture the imagination. Carcer City presents bleak,
concrete urban space, replete with a striking amount of detail, from a massive
catalogue of urban forms. Trash cans, rusting shopping carts, garbage, broken
glass, electrical cables, and meter boxes, AC units, storm drains, wheelie bins,
chain link fences, dense networks of telegraph poles, traffic lights and street
lamps. These familiar urban forms were programmed for the function of Carcer
City; the player’s eye, flickering across virtual space, takes in everything, but
never rests on details for long. They were designed to be absorbed, not observed.
Urban videogame spaces are simulacra of real urban spaces and so must
exhibit the same urban visual lexicon which we absorb, but do not observe, daily.
This brings attention to the strange notion that mundane details, e.g. trash bags
or A.C. units, while we pay them no attention, are in some way fundamental to
our understanding of urban reality. Film sets, also concerned with a simulation
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of reality work in a similar way. In Blade Runner it is such a close attention to
detail that gives its spaces the exhilarating sense of ‘hyper reality’.
The invisible architecture of game environments and film sets prompted
me to reassess the peripheral information – “just urban crap” (Crumb, Zwigoff
1994), as Robert Crumb has put it -‐ and to record (take photos), re-‐organise and
illustrate. As I aim to achieve an immersive experience through my images, detail
is crucial.
Manhunt was an important influence for the lens of extreme bleakness
through which it viewed urban space. The game’s detail and peripheral
information played an important, unseen role in this vision. However, in terms of
narrative possibility, for players to create their own stories, the game was in fact
quite limited. Game-‐play operated under a -‐ fairly strict -‐ hide / sneak / kill
narrative system. I am interested in the idea of an immersive world (especially
an urban one) of the sort seen in all of these visual storytelling formats – comics,
film and games – that might exist and function autonomously from traditional
narrative conventions.
Blade Runner goes some way to achieving this. The film has been
criticized for poor characterization and for ‘falling short emotionally’ at the
expense of special effects and visual spectacle. Many have acknowledged this
failing but argued that the core dynamic by which the film actually works rests in
the landscape / setting. Blade Runner does not rely so much on the traditional
narrative conventions of characterization and a rigid plotline, and is focused
more on the world it imagines. In a way, the city itself is the central protagonist
of Blade Runner. Foremost, the film is a mesmerizing representation of urbanity,
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which the characters kind of lurk beneath, presenting a loose, more open-‐ended
approach to narrative.
Grand Theft Auto V was released earlier this year in what was a defining
cultural moment -‐ British newspaper The Guardian has hailed GTA V as “A
dazzling but monstrous parody of modern life”. For me, the game represents
contemporary urbanity, reflected with a mesmerizing totality. It allows for
completely open-‐ended exploration of the ‘infinite narrative potential’ of the city.
Of course, GTA V has characters, and a main narrative arc, but these are entirely
disposable – what is truly amazing about it, and the reason behind the series’
enduring success, is the virtual world that it builds. At its very core, the game is
truly about its environment. In GTA V, the city of Los Santos really is the
protagonist. With you, the player/viewer directing, the world drives stories,
daring you to test its limits; and your expectations are repeatedly confounded by
an apparent infinity of possibility and complexity…
You hang out in a parking lot. As the sun sets, casting everything in brilliant
orange, you are drinking sodas from a vending machine. As you sling the empty
cans onto the concrete, they roll across the ground and into the gutter. You take
Chop, your dog, for a walk to the local park. It is grey and drizzling now, and you
get bored playing fetch. You spot an unlocked bicycle and decide to steal it. After a
few successful wheelies and bunny-‐hops, you fall off and graze your knee. You give
the now bent bike a kick for good measure -‐ blood drips from a hole in your jeans.
At this point you notice some local ‘hoods’ across the park are gesturing at you.
They start shouting and you shout back – before long it’s escalated and there is a
gang of thugs chasing you across the rainy, soggy park. Hopping a chain-‐link fence,
you dart down a side alley. You turn a corner too fast and run straight into a
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rusting shopping cart. It clatters across the dirt, taking a trash-‐can with it. Rotten
garbage and rats scurry franticly across the dirt. You keep running. After climbing
a few more fences, creeping through some neighbor’s yards and crawling past
kitchen windows, you find yourself at your own back door. You lost them. In the
living room, your aunt is on the floor doing aerobics. You crash onto the couch, and
turn on the TV. As you light up a joint, the last rays of the evening sun are coming
through the living room blinds. That ‘sun dust’ stuff is floating around. You can
make out the shapes of cars cruising through the neighborhood, and people milling
about in the street outside, through the blinds. You lie back into the couch, and
smoke…
The effect where imaginative players can invent and immerse themselves
in their own stories is a direct result of the breathtaking meticulousness with
which the environment was designed. The makers of GTA V (Rockstar North) are
well known for their obsessive creation of game worlds with an inexhaustible
wealth of detail.
The painstaking approach and intricacy with which I construct my own
hand-‐drawn spaces, aims at creating a similar effect to that seen in GTA. Viewers
may imaginatively enter the spaces, and become actors ‘inventing’ the kind of
meandering stories or narratives similar to the ones allowed by the complexity
seen in Los Santos. In a way, my images are ‘portraits’ of a protagonist – the city
itself. The peripheral information and details are component parts of the city –
mini protagonists, and they have roles to play in unseen dramas, which are
directed by the viewer. In their density and congestion, the details combine. The
spaces and city as a whole, become a many-‐membered organism or entity which
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interferes, distracts, seduces, and ultimately conditions the viewer / storyteller’s
movements through the spaces.
In what follows, I shall introduce and discuss some of the key formal
choices and aesthetics that I employ in the construction of this vision of urbanity,
where the city becomes the protagonist. Firstly, I shall outline a concept known
as ‘retrofitting’, which describes a post-‐industrial aesthetic – a kind of ‘corroded’
hi-‐tech; before discussing the role(s) it plays in my imaginary spaces / city. I will
also elaborate upon the influence of graphic design, and candy and junk-‐food
product packaging that can be seen in some of my work. I will attempt to explain
the somewhat complicated relationship that graphics and packaging has with the
proliferation of trash, discarded items, fragments of refuse and other ‘nuggets’ of
congestion that inhabit my images. Retrofitting, garbage, and sickly, lurid
graphics all contribute to a pervasive sense of urban bleakness seen throughout
my work. I will discuss my attraction to bleak urban spaces, before positing the
idea that, in a way, my images might call for a re-‐assessment of the perception of
such spaces as ‘unpleasant’.
Architect and theorist Charles Jencks explained how, post Blade Runner,
‘predictions of a future Los Angeles dystopia have grown in number and
credibility,’ and how commentators on current cities have described ‘… a typical
dark scenario… (of) corroding hi-‐tech, no-‐go ganglands, runaway pollution,
freeway shootings… super congestion’ (Jencks 1993, 13)
The Star Wars universe may have sown the seed of corroded hi-‐tech, but
Blade Runner was the real exponent of this aesthetic. The architecture of L.A.
2019 was characterized by external piping, ducting, bare-‐bones machinery and
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makeshift electronics, snaking rampantly across the sides of buildings; a sort of
nightmare heavy-‐metal ivy, growing at a rate impossible to restrain. The term
‘retrofitting’ has been used by industrial designer and Blade Runner ‘visual
futurist’ Syd Mead to explain this phenomenon. Retrofitting describes (in Mead’s
own words) ‘…upgrading old machinery or structures by slapping new add-‐ons
on to them’ (Mead, Bukatman 1997, 21). Retrofitting is a process brought about
by necessity. Malfunctioning or redundant machinery is simply modified or built
on top of so that it may resume its utility or meet some new requirement. This
approach makes for an anarchic aesthetic. The machines feed and grow from the
remains of their rotting predecessors, and have no constant form, showing a
predilection in their design for the chaotic and severe aesthetics of industrialism.
The retrofitted buildings of L.A. 2019 present architecture and technology in a
seemingly organic cycle of growth and decay.
Retrofitting became a key part of the urban aesthetic in Cyberpunk.
However, it is also a real phenomenon that exists in the world and was inspired
by the layering of structure and architecture that goes on in modern urban
environments, especially in certain Asian cities – for example, Tokyo, Kyoto,
Beijing, or Hong Kong. Retrofitting is a concept that informs my reading of real
urban space.
While exploring cities like Istanbul, Tokyo, and Kyoto, but also in Scotland
-‐ Edinburgh and Glasgow -‐ I am attracted to the proliferation of structure
adorned with external ducting, and industrial / mechanical forms. This is
reflected in my own, hand-‐drawn world. In building my imaginary city,
retrofitting plays a number of key roles in the way spaces function. (figs. 6 and 7)
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Fig. 6: The Chinese Kitchen (detail) showing retrofitting
Fig. 7: The Chinese Kitchen (detail) showing retrofitting
It contributes to information density, which, as we have seen, helps to create
totality, and narrative possibility. The ‘corroded hi-‐tech’ aesthetic of retrofitting
also supports the sense of urban bleakness that permeates the spaces. Finally,
retrofitting reinforces the idea of the city itself as the central protagonist of the
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work. It shows time, bestowing upon structure, architecture and in turn, the city
as a whole, character-‐like traits such as a ‘personal’ history. The ‘seemingly
organic cycle of growth and decay’, suggested by retrofitting, also allows me to
draw analogies between architecture -‐ and the city -‐ to organic entities like the
human body and mind, suggesting its ability to move, change and to ‘act’.
Seductive and sickly day-‐glo graphics found on the candy wrappers, fast
food packets and other urban detritus that litter our everyday landscapes really
interest me. I get a strange kind of inspiration from the designs found on cans of
Irn Bru, Slap!, Kick, Nos and other products which I drink and eat, while drawing
late at night. If they were creatures, their natural habitat would be amongst
broken glass in a rainy car park.
The graphic design on the Mama brand ‘Oriental Kitchen’ instant noodle
cup (Fig. 8) captured my imagination powerfully.
Fig. 8: Mama brand Oriental Kitchen instant noodle cup
It brought my mind to the piles of steaming seafood and the nuclear colors of
General Tso’s chicken you can find glowing warmly under the strip lighting of
Chinese buffets and dining halls. The beautiful neon and golden graphics of the
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noodle cup conjured up the delicious atmosphere and the dreams and happiness
that the Chinese buffet promises. At the same time, the noodle cup, in reality, was
a piece of garbage, and this recalled the concrete desolation of the trash-‐strewn
parking lot (commonly found outside the Chinese Buffet). The parking lot
represents the sort of undesirable non-‐place, so easily re-‐imagined as a dystopia
in Blade Runner, or a nightmarish setting for violence in Manhunt. For me, pieces
of rubbish, such as the noodle cup, become artifacts of great value and interest
that, in a complex interplay of graphics and form, summon the contradictory
scenarios of junk food utopias and their inherently bleak urban surroundings.
A desire to explore graphics; their flatness, use of text and imagery, and
the ‘natural habitats’ of the detritus on which they are found, was the initial
inspiration for a different series of prints.
My prints Huge Mart, (fig. 9) and Oriental Kitchen (Fig.10) are spaces where
fragments of other drawings could be recycled, released from their realistic
virtual environments, and allowed to float around, existing just as ‘graphics’
alongside text and pattern etc., rather than as ‘real’ objects existing in real
spaces. These images relate to the imaginary city, which I am building, but are
more personal and self-‐referential. For example, they allow me to engage more
directly with my influences (e.g. presence of Ren and Stimpy in Huge Mart), to
play with different drawing styles, scribbles and doodles, and to experiment with
the languages of the graphic designs that inspire me. None of this would belong
in the other works, to which the illusion of realistic space is essential.
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Fig. 9: Huge Mart Jamie Kinroy, photolithograph, 22 x 28” (2013)
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Fig. 10: Oriental Kitchen Jamie Kinroy, photolithograph, 25 x 31” (2013)
As I have shown, my vision of the urban environment is intrinsically
bleak. This is apparent in both the spatially realistic images (Jamie’s World, The
Chinese Kitchen, and Hotel Rich) as well as the graphic-‐design driven images
(Huge Mart, Oriental Kitchen) where space distorts. The dystopian vision of Blade
Runner provided me with an aesthetic lens and a visual language or vocabulary
with which to engage my immediate urban surroundings. The perpetual night
and rain, and crowded, grimy squalor of Scott’s LA, 2019 spoke strongly to my
experience of urban Scotland. On the dark, wet streets of Edinburgh and
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Glasgow, vomit, broken glass, dog-‐shit and garbage were widespread. The
grayness was punctuated with neon, and the lights of the late-‐night fast food, bar
and café scene.
‘Urban crap’ (broken glass, garbage, trash bags, retrofitting) of the sort
that is intricately reflected in Manhunt, Blade Runner, Grand Theft Auto and so on,
is daily and undeniable. It is the result of a curious feat of perception that urban
dwellers choose not to see, but to step over and live with these parts of city life –
a kind of everyday desolation that is inherently bound to the aesthetics of
modern urbanity. Prompted by my influences, my work suggests a reversal of
perception, whereby bleak spaces and their component parts (trash, corroded
architecture / machinery) become focal points to be explored and examined. I
do not see density and street squalor as a negative thing. Strangely, I am
attracted to, and find a peculiar comfort in such desolate urban places like car
parks, congested, dirty alleyways and refuse areas found behind restaurants. To
some degree, I am opposed to the conventional reading of such spaces as
dystopian, proposing that they might rather be fascinating sites of discovery, to
be cherished, rather than avoided.
In an attempt to understand my strange attraction to ‘unpleasant’ urban
spaces, Mike Davis’s, at times apocalyptic, accounts of contemporary Los Angeles
are useful. Davis turns a critical eye on contemporary architecture and urban
planning, describing how urban space and structures are far from politically
neutral. Often they are designed to play a role in Police, governmental, or private
corporate security apparatus, with the insidious intent of control, and subliminal
“ policing of social boundaries” (Davis 1992, 223).
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“The neo-‐military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates
violence and conjures imaginary dangers. In many instances the semiotics of so-‐
called ‘defensible space’ are just about as subtle as a swaggering white cop.
Today’s upscale, pseudo-‐public spaces – sumptuary malls, office centers, culture
acropolises and so on – are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass
‘Other’. ” (Davis 1992, 226)
He goes on to describe the erosion of public space, resultant of aggressive
design tactics deployed by city planners and corporate architects in order to
exclude people of low social status; in particular ‘street people’ (i.e. the
homeless). This, argues Davis, has brought L.A. to a point where there are almost
no truly ‘public’ spaces left.
“The contemporary opprobrium attached to the term ‘street person’ is in
itself a harrowing index of the devaluation of public spaces. To reduce contact
with untouchables, urban redevelopment has converted once vital pedestrian
streets into traffic sewers and transformed public parks into temporary
receptacles for the homeless and wretched.” (Davis 1992, 226)
Such a perspective helps to elucidate the reasons that allow my positive
view of so-‐called ‘unpleasant’ spaces. Davis explains how a “conscious
‘hardening’ of the city surface against the poor” (Davis 1992, 232) can be read in
today’s ‘pseudo-‐public’ spaces (sumptuary malls, office centers etc.). With this in
mind, the opposing bleak urban spaces that I portray, like the grubby, chaotic
surroundings of the cheap restaurant in The Chinese Kitchen, and the trash-‐and-‐
turd littered car park seen in Aldi (one of the few of my works to show the
presence of humans), can be newly interpreted.
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Fig. 11: Aldi Jamie Kinroy, photolithograph, 15 x 18” (2013)
Fig. 12: The Chinese Kitchen (detail), another microcosm, showing the grubby, trash-‐strewn,
chaotic surroundings of the cheap Chinese restaurant
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While they may not be completely free, they might now be seen as democratic,
public spaces of liberation. Trash, retrofitting, and other irrational components
are bound up in this new vision, and no longer have to be understood as the
filthy signs of urban chaos. In a way, they signify a kind of freedom of space, and
by showing the traces of other people; they are points of connection to other
human experience and stories.
As we have seen, my images present an imaginary world that aims to
achieve an immersive quality through intense detail and a realistic sense of
perspective and depth. I am the architect, and this world is personal to me, but
importantly it reflects elements of urban reality, which I have, and continue to
experience daily. It is important that my city, while fictional, is to some extent
recognizable and familiar to the viewer. The images speak of the dense and
overwhelming urban visions of cyberpunk seen in manga like Akira and films
like Blade Runner, which endure, and continue to reflect our urban environments
with an alarming accuracy. My work also describes an extreme sense of urban
bleakness, and chaotic density via retrofitting, trash and detailed congestion, that
is influenced by representations of urban environments in videogames like
Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto. Film and especially videogames are products of
the technologically cutting edge, contemporary world that we live in today. My
work is not a film, or a videogame. So what does it mean to draw in a retrofitted,
cyberpunk world?
My work is rooted in comics. However, it’s important that the images are
not comics, and that they avoid a sequential kind of illustration that describes a
single, linear story. I see my work as fine art, sitting perhaps, alongside other
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contemporary artists who draw, such as Paul Noble, and the German artist
Johanness Spehr. The influence of videogames is very apparent in Spehr’s work,
and Noble’s images strongly present a fixation with modern architecture and
other things, like typography and classic literature. Like Noble and Spehr’s work,
I see my own images as existing within a fertile ‘space of becoming’ (fine art)
where many traditional, contemporary, and (especially in my case) pop-‐cultural
references can coalesce into something new.
Videogames are the collaborative products of vast networks of creatives
and artists, now working with (in many cases) budgets that surpass that of many
Hollywood movies. Like film, the results can be spectacular, mesmerizing. But to
some extent this results in a disconnect of the viewer. While they can be stunning
products, because the means of production is beyond easy comprehension, they
can be overwhelming and indigestible. With this in mind, I propose the idea that
drawing, while defiantly ‘low-‐tech’ seems an appropriate medium with which to
tackle issues of contemporary urbanity, like information density.
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List of References
Bukatman, Scott. 1997. Blade Runner, London: British Film Institute
Dassin, Jules. 2009. The Naked City, Arrow Films
Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz : excavating the future in Los Angeles, New York:
Vintage Books
Jencks, Charles. 1993. Heteropolis: Los Angeles: the riots and the strange beauty of
hetero-‐architecture, London: Academy Editions
Sammon, Paul M. 1997. Future Noir: the making of Blade Runner, London: Orion
Publishing Group
Webb, Michael. 1996. Like today only more so: The credible dystopia of Blade
Runner. In: Neumann, Dietrich. Ed. Film architecture: set designs from Metropolis
to Blade Runner, Munich: Prestel
Zwigoff, Terry. 1994. Crumb, Sony Pictures Classics
