ABADYL
A virtual city

DESCRIPTION
Abadyl is a kind of utopia. It attempts, as Michael Sorkins “Local Code”, “to imagine a city via a code, a regulatory prescription for an urban fantasy. Such theories lodge in a space between nature, culture, technology, politics and economics on the one hand, and a set of physical visions, on the other. All cities are formed by this relationship, whether simple or complex, acknowledged or unconscious.” (Sorkin, 1993) But where he ends in theory, we actually started in the creations of a mixed reality space – the city of Abadyl.

“As a space of “unthinkable complexity,” the matrix is simply too vast, too dense, too complex to be comprehended in its entirety, There is, moreover, no external perspective from which it could be grasped as a whole; the matrix can only be viewed from within. Thus, there can be no map that would chart its overall space, no schematic diagram that would trace its complete circuitry. Any attempt to take in the matrix globally, as a whole world, can only yield a vague sense of it as a mutated, techno logical space (a cyberspace) beyond representation, a sense that is very much like the experience that Kant described as “the sublime?’ Yet, given the technological status of the matrix, a status that would have excluded it from Kant’s notion of the sublime, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of the matrix as the space of, to use Fredric Jameson’s provocative phrase, a “technological sublime.” (Rutsky, 1999)

In 1997 we got a grant from the art council in Sweden for making a project called “from an indefinite point in the Cartesian space”. Here we went around the world and visited different places and locations that have had very specific ideologies, that been abandoned but have left some traces in forms of monuments and buildings behind. The focus was to see how people on the different locations dealt with the very present past in forms for example abandoned buildings and monuments. How their everyday life was influenced. Based on that we tried to developed new stories and expressions in relation to the actual place itself, this was later overlaid back onto the site itself in forms of drive-by video projections. The bad thing with this approach was that is was very hard to document the final outcome of the project. The project was shown both as a gallery exhibition and on Internet in 1999-2000.

PRODUCTION
Michael Johansson

WEB
www.abadyl.lowend.se