In 2014, The Game was aired on BBC, a Cold War spy thriller set in 1970s London. Its aesthetic draws from visual tropes of grey London. And MI5’s headquarters is housed in a brooding brutalist structure in the Square Mile. This building was not in London, however, but was Birmingham’s Central Library by John Madin, which was condemned to be demolished.
Instruments of pixel manipulation construct these faultless fictions, a technique which is also applicable in the process of image making or architectural storytelling. This performative lecture questions the significance of relocating pixels beyond reality, and the reading of urban identity presented to us from these operations.
