Render Ghosts
This is the one. I have been looking for this. There are others that I haven't found yet within the existing archive, but this is the one I saw and knew it was true.
This is a photograph of a construction hoarding. It is a detail of a rendering of the new Whitney Museum in the meatpacking district in NYC, currently under construction and due for completion in 2014. Most of this is real: the street and the High line, the brick building. I'm not sure about the foliage. In this detail, the computer-generated new Whitney building is out of shot.
The men are real too, except they were photographed a long way away, a long time ago. They are two of the "Business People" included in a pack of imagery created some time in the 1990s by RealWorld Imagery. You can see the images here: www.imagecels.com/thumnail/201/201.html - these men are labelled PEOPL114 and PEOPL159 (the latter has been mirrored from the original).
RealWorld is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the original contact sheets are (c) 2000 InterDimensional Publishing. That's all I know about the source of these images. Repeated email enquiries to RealWorld have gone unanswered.
At some point in the last decade, RealWorld's imagery escaped onto the net, and has become the default set for every visualisation artist and studio I've spoken to, pirated and shared across thousands of hard drives. They've marched across hoardings from Shanghai to San Francisco. They've been to the Olympics. They've owned condos and worked in highrise office blocks. They have stood in for the future, time and again.
I don't know who they are. I'm pretty sure they don't know they're here either. But there they are, here and there, endlessly replicated across the network and across architecture.
A cloud head rising over the mesa in Dulce, New Mexico - that is exactly the same, in every detail - as one photographed in Queenstown, New Zealand.
Render Ghosts
This is the one. I have been looking for this. There are others that I haven't found yet within the existing archive, but this is the one I saw and knew it was true.
This is a photograph of a construction hoarding. It is a detail of a rendering of the new Whitney Museum in the meatpacking district in NYC, currently under construction and due for completion in 2014. Most of this is real: the street and the High line, the brick building. I'm not sure about the foliage. In this detail, the computer-generated new Whitney building is out of shot.
The men are real too, except they were photographed a long way away, a long time ago. They are two of the "Business People" included in a pack of imagery created some time in the 1990s by RealWorld Imagery. You can see the images here: www.imagecels.com/thumnail/201/201.html - these men are labelled PEOPL114 and PEOPL159 (the latter has been mirrored from the original).
RealWorld is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the original contact sheets are (c) 2000 InterDimensional Publishing. That's all I know about the source of these images. Repeated email enquiries to RealWorld have gone unanswered.
At some point in the last decade, RealWorld's imagery escaped onto the net, and has become the default set for every visualisation artist and studio I've spoken to, pirated and shared across thousands of hard drives. They've marched across hoardings from Shanghai to San Francisco. They've been to the Olympics. They've owned condos and worked in highrise office blocks. They have stood in for the future, time and again.
I don't know who they are. I'm pretty sure they don't know they're here either. But there they are, here and there, endlessly replicated across the network and across architecture.
A cloud head rising over the mesa in Dulce, New Mexico - that is exactly the same, in every detail - as one photographed in Queenstown, New Zealand.