Andy Hughes crafts a thought-provoking narrative using a montage that juxtaposes in-game footage from Cyberpunk 2077 with historical archive film, illustrating a chilling vision of a dystopian future dominated by corporate powers.
In Andy Hughes’s Inner Migration (2023), a motorcycle races through Night City’s neon-lit streets. Recorded hyper-realistic in-game scenes from Cyberpunk 2077 are juxtaposed with black and white archive film footage — à là Adam Curtis — revealing cooling towers overlaid with early space-age imagery. The dystopian future depicted in CD Projekt Red’s futuristic world offers a vivid portrayal of an urban landscape where powerful corporations not only govern technological advancements but also play a significant role in shaping and exploiting people, places, and the environment.
Hughes’s avatar travels through the landscape, running across a trash mountain and swimming backwards into a sunset. We also see and hear archive material from Out of This World (1964) and To New Horizons (1940), two promotional American domestic films created by General Motors that present future worlds. Exploring this virtual world like a post-modern day flâneur, the artist looks for what the French philosopher Michel Serres described as soft pollution. While we can measure what Serres described as hard pollution —- the poisoning of the Earth — we ignore at our peril the disastrous impact of the soft pollution created by sound and images on our psyche..
Works cited
Andy Hughes, Inner Migration, machinima/digital video, colour, sound, 10’ 00”, England
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