Dreams of Dead Malls

Dead Mall in Thailand. Photo Credit: 2026, Naruto Memer.
(Note: Full color photos have been modified for this post.)
My apologies to the individual photographers.)

Saturday, May 06, 2006

"I had one of my Giant Shopping Mall of the Future dreams last night. "Blade Runner" meets "Mad Max" as directed by Romero, with me as the unwitting star. (I was searching for my cats.)

Epic mounds of detritus, cannibalized machinery, meandering hordes of suburban nomads in search of an obscure fix. As always, a feeling of detachment and loss; a whole millennium dashed upon unfriendly concrete shores as the population cowers from a sky it's never seen, oddly content among the crowded memories of a derelict century.

I'm watching from the meticulously stripped-down carriage of an elevator, camera in hand, filming the spectacle floor by floor. Strangers pass like silhouettes consigned to Celluloid purgatory, just out of reach. And I descend into the hive's very guts, enamored of the darkness."

- Mac Tonnies via this Posthuman Blues post.

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The deceased Randall Park Mall (and a dangling conversation). Photo credit: Seph Lawless.

Friday, November 05, 2004

This reinvented world is hushed, stagnant; the excesses of today's fast-forward commercial ecology keep the population in virtual submission. It's not necessarily that there are fewer people; it's simply that humans will find themselves dwarfed by structures whose function seems to balance on the razor's edge of obsolescence. Ever seen a deserted shopping mall slated for demolition? Imagine a whole country with that same sad, desiccated atmosphere; a world thrown rudely upon the concrete shores of its own past.

A man sits on the jetee, bracketed by clammy concrete walls, and sips rice tea. He watches the tide -- warm and strangely odorless -- rush in, crashing against the fortified seawall with a peculiarly electric sound. Lukewarm spray beads the asphalt between his feet.

I am watching.

- Mac Tonnies via this Posthuman Blues post.

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May 21, 2008

"But the locations in my dreams are far from what I’d expect of wish-fulfillment fantasies. As familiar as they’ve become, there’s nothing overtly pleasant about them. Rather, they seem more than slightly ominous: jaundiced psychic postcards from the near-future landscapes of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. My very identity is relegated to that of a confused tourist; my itinerary, if there is one, seems limited to so much queasy sight-seeing. I can’t plot a meaningful course of action, so I merely watch — and awake with my mind’s eye awash in fragments."

- Mac Tonnies via his Futuristic article: 

Dreams of the Future. Inset right is a photo Mac would love: a scene from a mannequin slaughter at Macy's (found here) by Alaina.

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(Continued below the break...)