The urban landscape

Polygonal Cities is a series of digital prints with the theme of the urban landscape. The title is derived from the digital technique used to produce them; a polygon being the basic geometric building block used in computer 3D modelling.

The sites featured in the series include a cafe, mall, fast food outlet, hotel and a church. Geographically, the locations used in the first twenty prints range from the urban fringe in my part of the world, Melbourne, to the older precincts of regional Victorian towns like Bendigo and Ballarat, and to countries such as Turkey and the Netherlands.

Originally the series was intended to be seen in the context of Psychogeography which is the act of walking through an urban space for the purpose of absorbing its cultural, political and aesthetic meanings. This spirit certainly still drives the work despite the dropping of the reference to Psychogeography. The neutrality, lack of specificity and ownership of the title Polygonal Cities being preferable to the constraints imposed by a philosophy whose adherents may well have firm ideas about.

This interest in the meaning of the urban landscape started in the early 1980's when I rented a studio in an old building in the central business district of Melbourne. The views of the skyscrapers and lunchtime crowds of office workers led to the reading of architecture books, even specialist titles dealing with hotel design and office furniture. Illustrations from the latter provided the fundamentals for 3-fazed (top) a screenprint made around 1980.

This industrially coloured scene with its ludicrously enlarged dry transfer figures provides in some respects the template for Polygonal Cities. The drink vending machine re-appears in Polygonal City 9 and similar furnishings are seen in Polygonal City 17 and the simple cardboard cutout figures such as the foreground figure in Polygonal City 6.

Although 3-fazed could validly be considered a critique of the world it depicts it is also a clinical investigation of that world using appropriately mechanical techniques. Similarly, Modernist Boxes (bottom) which outwardly appears to be a pseudo pointillist exercise is part of a series paintings looking at outer suburbia and made by stencilling colour onto the canvas with a mylar dot screen.

Polygonal Cities inherits some of this sense of the detached observer but with a high tech means of analysing and reconstructing the photos on which they are based. Where 3-fazed used the technical vocabulary of the commercial printer, Polygon Cities employs the visualisation technology of the architectural artist.