CONSUMER UTOPIANS

At the base of the hill in the shallow valley next to the slowly flowing River Stour, the new retail entertainment complex is entering it penultimate stage of construction, with rooves already having been put in place and glass panels in the process of getting hung. Yet it is still a construction site with earth movers noisily entering and leaving the secured compound. And although I would like to see some of these building activities, interested as I am in the bones of what will in time gain flesh and skin, I am in the main prevented from doing so because occluding most of my view are large interconnected boards with no gaps to even get a glimpse, and I am left to extrapolate what is going on from the sounds of machinery, and the clang and crunch of large materials yielding to their growling force.

What I do see however are the artist’s impressions of what this complex will become printed onto these boards – a near future paradise of wide boulevards, boardwalks and plazas, with green areas that have paths crisscrossing them, and rising up on many sides are the glass fronted international brand named retail and entertainment outlets now common across the whole of the country. Interspersed are blocks of apartments that appeal to curated life-styles redolent of what is considered by the planners as a desirable form of urban living, their boutique or pere de terre insinuations appealing to what is deemed to be the modern taste of young professional individuals without responsibilities, except for themselves and their significant other’s, and with an excess of expendable credit to partake in the many hedonistic opportunities available in this nouvelle quarter of the city to come. The future it seems is this way of life, so the images purport, yet though I might wish to indulge myself in the idea of this dream, living an imaginary existence premature to the complex’s completion, my own credentials, as I’m sure is the case with so many others, does not seem not fit in with this compelling impression, and I am left feeling this tantalising future has excluded me before I have had a chance to experience it in the real. Indeed, the inhabitants populating this virtual space indicate this. Consisting of mostly young adults, their simulated existences here came into being elsewhere, not as children who grew up in other places and had the good fortune to end up here, but who were instead subjects, or more to the point, objects from other photographs that had their previous backgrounds masked out, and were then composed judiciously to appear purposefully present in this virtual future space. They are the ideal, easy-look candidates excised from their former places from which there is a cut and paste amnesia, and are then re-situated like tabula rasa into this new setting, their purpose being merely as set dressing to appeal to real people who pass either by foot or by car, so that these real people will wish to be transported into the bodies of these representations of attractive lucky people.

The purposelessness of this retail heaven of ersatz life-styling comes into focus however, as its ultimate goal is commodity exchange to the exclusion of everything else – a promise that is ultimately empty, with those who are attracted to this place, deported through their dreams to act on these, and will discover some time into their own futures the hollow existence of a simplistic two dimensional world created for them. The future as it appears everywhere in these optimistically disturbing images is so empty of any substance except for the passing hedonism of a new luxury purchase, or the temporary sublimity conjured up by a blockbuster movie.

Walking between these places of consumption, along the many pathways and avenues provided for the purpose of profitable footfall – these empty passages from which the minds of these future people race towards the next spectacle, is a hiatus without these distractions, and they might well come to consider, if only for a moment before again becoming subsumed in these illusions, the utter futility of their waking lives being cast, like the many cut-out figures, in someone else’s dreamscape.