Game Art: Coll.eo's "AFTER CARS" (2012)

"AFTER CARS is a photographic documentation of digital sculptures created by Coll.eo within Garry’s Mod v. 13. GMOD is a sandbox physics game based on a modified Source Engine originally introduced in 2006.

Alternating a surrealist sensibility with a dark, cerebral sense of humor, AFTER CARS evokes a distinct 1970s pre-apocalyptic vibe, whose aesthetics of disorder, destruction, and devolution was perfectly captured by the cover art of seminal Pelican paperbacks like Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers (1966 edition) and Terence Bendixson's Instead of Cars (1977 edition). What makes AFTER CARS uncanny is the juxtaposition of the “natural” and the machinic in a completely virtual. What are these automobiles doing in a pastoral, idyllic meadow surrounded by distant hills? Were they kidnapped from their “natural” setting (i.e. the city, seen from a distance) and then killed, execution-style? Is the viewer visiting a car cemetery? Or some kind of auto purgatory?"

: Coll.eo

Submitted by Matteo Bittanti