PN.26.013. Art. Studio project, 2026.
Outer Provinces
A gazetteer of the far edges of a settled future: a salt elevator, farms on aqueducts, a monastery in a melting iceberg.
A gazetteer of the far edges of a settled future, from the survey office of a government that no longer answers its post. Five places, three thousand years from here, and none of them has heard of the others.
The Salt Lift
The cable has not been inspected in living memory, and nobody at its foot wants to be the one who asks. Caravans cross the white pan for eleven days to reach the warehouses, where salt is still the only currency that keeps. Goods go up. Nothing has come down since the reign of the last Harbourmaster. On clear evenings the town's children lie on the roofs and watch the cable disappear into the cloud, and they argue about what it is attached to.
The Aqueduct Delta
When the river rose, they did not move the city. They moved the farms up onto the aqueducts, one arch at a time, over four hundred years. The rice terraces now run for ninety kilometres along the tops of the old water-bridges, and each family owns an arch by the same deeds their ancestors used for a street. The dead are buried at sea, which is to say at the bottom of the garden.
The Orchard Ring
Nobody aboard remembers planting the trees, and the ship has been in blossom for six hundred years. The sun is a line. The horizon goes up. Children learn to walk on a floor that curves away from them in both directions, and they find the idea of a flat place frightening. The ring's old fruit is the only thing the crew agree on: there is a rule, older than the charter, that nobody may eat the first apple of the year.
The Ice Monastery
The order was founded on a simple observation: that the berg is melting, and that this is the point. Its monks carve their cells into the wall of a drifting tabular iceberg, and as the ice thins they carve deeper, knowing that the monastery will one day cease to exist on a date that can be calculated. They have calculated it. They keep the date in a sealed book. The lamps are for the boats, which come out in the polar night to ask them what it says.
The Seed Vault
One person at a time. The rule is painted on the only door, and the Keeper of the Lower Galleries has spent thirty-one years alone with every plant that has ever existed. She walks the catwalks with one lamp, turning the cylinders a quarter-turn each so that nothing settles. Upstairs, they think she is a myth. She has opened the outer door twice, both times to check that there was still an outside. She reports that there was.
The brief
Create futuristic worlds and concept art with strong direction, and give them somewhere to belong.
The idea
Science fiction is usually about the centre of the empire. These are the places the post no longer reaches, each with one strange piece of infrastructure and the people who have built a religion around it. Each painting has a short gazetteer entry, so every image has a story attached.
Decisions
- Wide panoramic format throughout, to stress scale.
- Each world has one dominant colour pair.
- A tiny human presence in every frame sets the scale.
- The text is dry and bureaucratic, which makes the strangeness land harder.
How it came together
- Invented five places, each with one piece of infrastructure.
- Gave each place a colour pair and a scale cue.
- Wrote a gazetteer entry for each, from the voice of a forgotten survey office.
How it works
Images at 3120 by 1328 pixels. Text set by the reading layout of this site.
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Hanging nearby
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Seven WeathersSeven algorithms, one climate. Drizzle is falling strokes, Anticyclone is contour lines, Hard Frost is one rule about sixty degrees.PN.26.018. Print series, Interactive viewer.