Where the people

Sometimes it boils down to that split-second decision to take the mobile device out of one's pocket and snap! One click, one shot. Capture that precise moment with non-conscious regard. Unfiltered. Raw. Unedited. An utmost trust in one's instincts paired with confidence in electronic gadgetry.

For instance capture that moment when a nondescript man is walking alone in a desolate Entertainment Quarter strewn with light pollution from neon lights of a cinema and a bowling alley. There is a palpable crispness to the emptiness of built environment spaces.

An empty Royal Hall of Industries that was once deemed the pinnacle of construction technology back in the day—circa 1913. Once affectionately called the "Showbag Pavilion" she has been an exhibition hall, morgue, roller-skating and ice-skating rink, boxing venue and ballroom. She's always been a little jealous of her sister across the road, the Hordern Pavillon who from the 70s right up to the late 90s hosted the coolest live music gigs, and rave parties. The cadence of light passing through her emptied insides exudes a beauty, not unlike sunlight passing through a diamond finely cut.

42 years of age, a bulwark of late 1970s brutalist architecture she has been voted as Sydney's ugliest building. UTS has been said to stand for Ugliest Tower in Sydney—the city's middle finger. Never mistaken for an ivory tower, she is at once conspicuous, defiant, and detested. Gentrified on the inside, perhaps her unusual beauty is starting to change 21st-century minds.

With increasing digitisation, and the proliferation of portable tablets and computing devices, the myth of the paperless office once predicted her demise. Yet the corresponding increase in electronic commerce, online shopping, and a seemingly endless stream of parcel deliveries have fueled her resurrection and once again resurgence.

Early morning on an empty street. Late to the game—when all the cars are gone, what would we do with all these empty roads that lead our imaginations to roam? When you're in the 1% who own cars and the rest have none, driving is a playful bliss, an enjoyable freedom, and a grateful privilege. When 100% of people own cars, driving becomes a painful chore in gridlocked traffic jams of atomised people secluded in their automotive shells, seething in rage, pathos, lost freedom and lack of meaning. Equity stinks!

Could our myopic focus, eye on the prize, the hoop, the goal lead to our collective demise? For if the wish is simply to win, one necessarily desires for the game to end and have one declared as "the winner"— a finite pyrrhic victory. Wouldn't it be an intention far more sublime to keep players playing, the game going, and evolving our collective play towards a horizon of infinite finesse?

Where has the 'going on being' of playful childhood gone? Has it been corrugated into the deemed strength and rigidity of adulthood—swallowed by the ridges and grooves of habit, routine, the insistent 'this is the right way of doing things'? The once proud strength is now corroding, rusting towards rest. Perhaps there is one last gasp in us. One more push to keep the dream kicking and screaming. We shall not go down without a fight!

The atomised individual is on edge, staring down at the abyss that stares back with contempt. The derelict edifice of secular enlightenment is crumbling. There is no hope in desperately clinging to identities which are nothing but empty linguistic shells cast off by narcissistic nihilists—a surfeit of suspicious epistemic. To fight living realities, real people who keep the lights on, the garbage collected, the children clothed and fed and denounce them because they have always resisted and ceased to conform to 'my truth' is the real epidemic of an epistemic virus. An egregious egregore rotting us to the core. Where the people are is where life survives.