Mirages: An Analysis of ISLANDS: Non-Places

Note: This article contains major spoilers for ISLANDS: Non-Places.

ISLANDS has one of the best opening hooks I've seen in a video game. A bus creaks to a halt, opens up its doors, and a dozen eggs float majestically out of it, chirping as they go. A lift smoothly lowers the bus into the ground, the vehicle drives off, and then the bus stop turns into an incubator for the eggs. That's the whole scene. Other games make you ask "What's the most efficient way to solve this problem?" or "What's this character's motivation?", but for a lot of Non-Places, I was asking just "What?".

ISLANDS: Non-Places is a gallery of ten 3D animations by artist Carl Burton. Each of Burton's vignettes starts by presenting an everyday human construct like a fountain, a lounge, or a baggage carousel. That construct will require some maintenance or else need to perform the function it was built for, which is where the scenes take a turn for the surreal. That surreal shift happens either through Burton adding a magical element to something mechanical or adding a mechanical element to something non-mechanical. So the fountain stops spraying water, has to be lifted out of the ground, and hanging from the bottom of it is a column of pipes and branches with a leak in it. Or in the case of the lounge, you must activate rising platforms which elevate the chairs in the room before it's flooded with water.

ISLANDS speaks to a ubiquity of technology in our towns and cities, but more than just starring technology, it is also concerned with representing the procedures it goes through. Objects are extended, retracted, raised, lowered, opened, closed, heated, and scanned. Burton's portraits of machinery have to exist as animations rather than stills because he wants to show these utilities transitioning from step to step of their operations. In ISLANDS, electronics and mechanics cannot just be thought of as sets of hardware but must also be considered in motion, fulfilling their purpose. This experience is necessarily interactive rather than passive because you press buttons to advance these processes and this gives them an air of industrial protocol.

In Non-Places, anywhere could turn into a factory floor at any moment, and this likely has some origin in Burton's first job where he provided animations to visualise scientific research. In fact, it doesn't take a lot of Googling to see everything that eventually became ISLANDS in Burton's other work. His 2012 short film Shelter starts with the stability of an attic in a thunderstorm and then stretches and warps it in every way possible. It's the same dissolve of reality that each of this game's scenes mimics. And the technique where he submerges each set in a single colour with liberal use of shadows comes straight out of his animated GIFs.

Burton's micro-animations almost definitely followed this format as a way to remain visually stimulating while also being technically non-demanding. GIFs have to have a small memory footprint to load with lightning speed, and so the person rendering the GIF usually sacrifices image quality for lower memory consumption, but there is another way. Burton uses only a few shades in each of his GIFs, and less colour to represent means a smaller file size. If I say "An indie game where the art style was moulded by technological constraints" you're probably going to start thinking about retro graphics or low-poly 3D, but ISLANDS is an example of it that's more outside the box. The same applies to its sound which, like some of Burton's video work, uses ambient noise to convey a sense of location within a small production budget. While there may be a lot of negative space around his subjects, being able to hear crowds or fauna tells you that they're not just ornaments floating in a void. The islands in ISLANDS exist somewhere.

This is an aesthetically-saturated game, but we have to be careful not to assume from that that it's purely here to look pretty and forgo substantial commentary. The fixtures of its art feel familiar because they're plucked from modern life, and so we can interpret a message about modernity from them. Burton zeroes in on portions of homes, places of leisure, and public service buildings but without portraying the people within them and while mixing them with the mechanical. We could look at that and say that this is a piece about how, in the 21st-century, we have become disengaged from the public around us, and our existences have been reduced to a routine of robotic processes, but I don't think that's the whole story. Yes, there's something formal and alienated about this montage of modernity, but if you look at what the technology is doing in each of the non-places, you see it's there to nurture and protect. It's incubating eggs, saving seats from a flood, connecting voices by a radio tower, watering plants, and helping residents into their homes.

Arguably, the islands all sample from "magical realism", an art genre which has the bizarre and fantastical invade the real. Proponents of the term say that magical realist art can't be grouped in with surrealism or fantasy, and one reason for that, they pose, is that magical realism keeps a tighter hold on normalcy than those art forms. It's not about transporting us to the subconscious or a mythical realm, but speculating about what would happen if the subconscious or mythical leaked into the world we live in, like they do in ISLANDS. The art style has emotional sway because it contrasts the relatable with the fantastical, heightening the strengths of both, but there's another thing the genre does well. By letting bizarre and delightful phenomena cascade forth from everyday locations and objects, magical realism often urges us to see the brilliance in what we would otherwise dismiss as the pedestrian.

Most of the vignettes in ISLANDS are about suggesting a space for the scene to take place in and then surprising us by showing us that the island extends beyond its suggested boundaries. E.g. There's a whole road under the street by the bus stop, there's a tree underneath the fountain, and the products in a cooler cabinet levitate outwards and orbit it. By breaking the boundaries of these everyday spaces, ISLANDS shows hidden wonders within them. It's got a lot of negative space, gruesome sirens, and operational protocol, but it also suggests that functional doesn't mean boring or inhuman. That supposedly unremarkable pockets of our urbanity like radio towers and waiting rooms are safe and nurturing thanks to procedures beyond our imagination that keep them running. Thanks for reading.