Strange images flit across my computer or phone screen.
A woman clad in a gauzy dress stares over a hall filled with pavilions whose bases sport ionic columns supporting transparent glass domes.
A couple dressed in what appears to be Mad Men-era cocktail attire sit somewhat glumly in a café, as if in a 1950s ad. The bar is a bit unusual: round lights, curved metal walls and a mixture of ornamental courses and what appear to be mechanical conduits surround them.
A building that hovers over the ground is somewhere between a spaceship and a brutalist or Metabolist structure that might have been built in the 1970s but is here surrounded by 1950s-vintage cars.
Another set of images: drones peer into the windows of working-class housing estates.
Workers labor in giant factories making microwave ovens. A city is almost drowned by rising sea levels but extends itself with floating buildings to survive. Oil rigs in the North Sea have become stations to harness energies from the waves of a world wracked by storms.
Where and, just as important, when are we?
A new world –or rather, an infinite array of worlds—is showing up on our screens. Somewhere between projection and memory, promise and warning, and extended fiction and extrapolated facts, these spaces appear as scenes that are vaguely familiar, but at the same time startling. Because of more than a century of science fiction, we recognize the cities with floating spaceships and the tendrils of technology attaching themselves to buildings that are versions of ones that exist today, sometimes inhabited by a motley crew of chimeras that are part human, part animal, part alien, and part machine.
What is new now is the elusive sense that these are not quite imaginary places, and not quite complete environments, but places we might already be inhabiting, and that these streams make us see. After all, how much different are these scenes from what the influencers present?
What is new, at least from my perspective, is these evocations’ proliferation and slickness. If, at the same time Sci-Fi emerged, we marveled at the fact that with a camera everybody could be a creator, now we can scroll through endless futurist feeds that are crystalline and complete in their presentation.
My recent favorite of all of these, and the one that the Meta empire’s feed algorithms seems to have decided I can’t get enough of, so that it has taken over some of my streams, are the endless reels and images produced by the Swedish “digital creator” Fredrik Jonsson. I lifted the scenes I described in the first paragraph from his stream.
Diving into his work through links on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, I was, first, astonished by the sheer volume of both still images and short movies he has produced in the last decade. It is a testament, of course, to his creativity and productivity, but also to the ease with which the confluence of animation, special effects,
Photoshop-like programs and apps, and AI can now let someone with talent spew out a seemingly endless set of variations on themes, and have them look like they were produced by a major movie studio.
Jonsson’s interests are broad, ranging from circus troupes that might be wandering either through the fringes of civilization or a post-apocalyptic landscape; bands of hippies camped out in the desert; Victorian-era cityscapes where steam locomotives meet spaceships; the spaceships themselves, outfitted by someone with a love for Italian culture of the Dolce Vita era; and scenes from what looks to me like Eastern Europe in the 1980s, but is more probably suburban Sweden from the same era. There are plenty of alien crafts and implements, some of them well-worn and reminiscent of the modular information and vending cubes that were ubiquitous in the Soviet empire before its fall, and their chimeric inhabitants mingle with handsome Scandinavians. The latter series made me imagine that a film director had made a movie of Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle, but as an alien invasion flick.
There does not seem to be a political agenda to Jonsson’s work, just as there is no particular focus or period. That is exactly what makes the work so eerie. It is at times seductive, letting us imagine if there had been a different line of continuity from the first inventions and architecture of the industrial revolution through a future not too far from now. Yet these worlds are also filled with poverty and strange beings, even if most of them seem to get along just fine with humans. What is most important is that it is not another world, but a version of our reality as it has evolved over the last 150 years put through a CGI and AI blender.
Young, on the other hand, has agendas. Much of his work is concerned with the issues raised by climate change and the rise and spread of the security state. Trained in architecture in Australia, he now works mainly as a film maker, although he also teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and has become a mainstay of architecture biennales and exhibitions. He has produced films in a more directly documentary mode, as when as he has panned over the reaches of containers stacked up in a Chinese port or photographed the array of telescopes searching for alien life from a Southwestern desert.
He has also delighted in purely fictional images, such as dancing astronauts whose suits are adorned with floral patterns, but almost all his work is tied to narratives meant to provide a critique of our current modes of production and urbanity. They emphasize a late capitalist environment of inhumanity, both in scale and material, and in the way they make human figures completely subservient to its logic. Young also shows the sharp contrast between the equipment and denuded landscapes. His work is almost as prolific as Jonsson’s, but deliberately less slick. He makes clear that what you are seeing is either fiction of documentary, or a mixture of both in which you can usually tell the parts apart.
In Young’s longer films he explores these themes more explicitly. In the Robot Skies, shown first in 2016, imagines a British neighborhood of high-rise apartments that is pervaded by drones peeking into every window. Here figures try to both manipulate and escape from those prying bits of technology as they inhabit and come together in their well-worn environments. In Planetary Redesign (2023), Young is perhaps more optimistic, imagining that we could repurpose the oil rigs that are now pumping the last reserves of oil out of the sea off the coast of England and Scotland into machines that generate energy from waves. His digital camera caresses these behemoths and the swirling ocean with all the love of a Wagnerian “Liebestod” aria.
Young also engages in a form of speculative urban planning in a series that includes New City, Planetcity, and Renderland, in which he shows us cities that appear to be, overall, Asian, partially ruined and yet invigorated and extended by technology that lets them survive in what appears to be a miasma of water and pollution.
Young’s films are longer than Jonsson’s and deserve to be seen at the scale made possible by hi def screens or, preferably, projections. They are closer to movies. They have something to warn us about and to give us hope. They are beautiful in an operatic manner. Jonsson is the master of the short form, implication and a seduction that at times even has sado-masochistic undertones. Banality and beauty are as intertwined here as in a slick fashion campaign, but they become eerie as the virtual camera pulls back and shows us spaces that go far beyond the focus of such selling tools.
I have no doubt that somewhere a movie director is studying both Jonsson’s and Young’s images with as much fascination I am, and that we will thus soon see them appear on traditional screens behind action heroes with superpowers seeking to save the world. In that sense, the work is no more or less than fodder for our culture industry –much like that of architects from Le Corbusier to Lebbeus Woods that been copied by set designers in Hollywood (the latter’s Underground Berlin drawings were copied rather literally in the film Twelve Monkeys). I also have no doubt that Jonsson’s and Young’s images will one day be, if they are not already, architecture. I am not sure whether to fear or welcome such an appropriation, but I am utterly seduced by the possibility.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: DSR's New Book | the Stupinigi Palace | Living in a Diagram | Bruce Goff | Biopartners 5 |Handshake Urbanism | the MONA | Elon Musk's Space X | AMAA | DIGSAU | Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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