Craig Smith

The invitation came through for the two of them to be interviewed on the radio that evening around half nine at the rural dockside station on the other side of Port Rhombus a solid half day drive from town where they drew blinds on their second floor apartment drank juice and coffee packed the station wagon with art supplies and food and set off in partial homage to how lovers Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop travelled up the Paris-Marseilles freeway in a rogue travelogue.

In contrast to how those two created fantasy out of dull service station parking lots and featureless road stops the focus for our town couple was how they collaborated on artworks (she painted he talked) depicting landscapes from early nineteen eighties video games that had created such an impression on their young minds that they were to recurrently seek these same geographies out forever more hence this trip would provide another time to find and paint these sites en plein air.

Exiting the city via the east end past pastel lemon hotel facade down King and Hunter children riding mechanical mega beasts think oversized animatronic wombat bilby platypus etc as part of a festival in Civic Park streamers confetti turn right at the interchange through Wickham stop at the lights see an elderly man in eggshell cotton at a wooden bench outside a pub drinking beer with a care robot clinking glasses the diesel powered humanoid tin can raising a pint in sunshine cheers.

At Bobs Farm they take a leg stretch beside a spruce windbreak and look at their picnic stash take an apricot a breadroll and soak up the shadows of the foliage wall listen to the chirping of a sparrow and then a wet sound tiny feathers shaking behind the trees an inground pool is nestled within a necklace of green no house just a utility shed with terracotta paving and a white diving board at knee height the pool so clear and crisp but not the object of an artwork today as it references nothing.

The first painting will be a little ways up the road at a point where the road turns in a gentle arc like a thumb in repose with mountainous clouds rising from the surface of the nail palm trees along the metacarpal and horizontal infinities of sand along the scan lines of cathode ray tube displays bleeding dust into high midday blue think Outrun and Virtua Racer the guy here can remember playing it in a cinema arcade and feeling a sense of internal motion never felt before or since.

Some ways towards Karuah they spot a meadow that closely resembles the playing field in Space Harrier and so many other titles from the period with checkerboard mown quadrants of shamrock pistachio crocodile green with distant orchid mountains just the feeling of walking across these fields take away the action the plot just leave the gentle trajectory onward as Beckett would say not on my way anywhere but simply on my way which she depicts and rests flat on the back seat to dry.

Hitting city streets that pull off beside a concrete crater the width of short term memory like an inverted dome perhaps the inversion of Bernhard's cone no it's just a skate bowl yet its silence manifests a monumental spiritual brutalism that she paints of course she does while he says this clearly means something to us yet eighties video games had not quite worked out how to romanticise the exploration of empty urban landscapes outside of say the uninhabited California Games.

Finding the radio station is easy it has a roadhouse with two rooms astride a gravel sweep at its back where they unpack a few basics the sun a glob of backlit sap let bulb within into a Shell service station courtyard for food an eatery opposite end to the cash register near the fuel injectors and air fresheners but look each booth has a full size plastic mascot a creature with a massive hamburger head and sesame seed hair and onion eyes with its tube arm outstretched ready to cradle you.

The couple pass on this uncanny setup and find instead a food van half a block down that sells kebabs and bao and what have you but here is the kicker it has a mounted television with Mario Kart hooked up beside the serving window where you can get a race in while the fryer dips sure wipe off the sauce the grease from the previous competitor but then you are off around the track they gesture to each other look at those trees the sky where the sand ebbs beneath salt water paradise pixels.

Just after nine and the couple get a call from the radio station the host has called in sick at the last minute but the producer on the line is ready and really it is an open opportunity to just come in and talk about anything or play tunes or whatever but the couple they aren't so sure when they get in there they are not feeling the vibe what about just cue up a few songs for the hour and they find a MIDI file of Jesu Joy Of Man's Desiring on the station computer and ask if that can be played on repeat.

Outside the couple sit on white plastic lawn chairs in the dust patio and look over the binary pointillism white yellow dot glow of valley city buildings with decimal motorways mauve illumination of neighbouring countries star systems ontologies better living through geometry he is about to talk about the ending of the first Streets of Rage game but holds off lest Bach be interrupted and she does not mention how this is the final chorale from the cantata Hearts and Mouth and Deed and Life.

They sleep and wake up and wander by the dock the lighthouse an artificial father figure to the sun beckoning it rise up before their morning embrace corduroy on wool palm on auburn flow to nape a stretch a yawn a dragging cage across damp slope filled with orange roughy and fellowfin tuna with a smell that references a morning even earlier than this some dark tidal drifting in praise of a quiet slowing of time they close up the boot of the wagon and skirt the mangroves on the motorway.

Near Tea Gardens a swimming pool unoccupied not dissimilar to the one spotted yesterday near Bobs Farm this one part of a private country club of some description unfenced on this side against the access road heat rising from the asphalt becoming quite a hot day what about a dip not here look at the water and they crouch the way it undulates in unbroken parabolic lines no edges but it does blink in little mounds from shadow off to sky mirror on it looks simulated beyond what nature renders.

Passing through a town another town more streets buildings they wonder what game this might be the obvious one comes to mind SimCity played in primary school computer classes nobody quite working out the economic subtleties which call to mind these suburbs are not unlike spreadsheet rows and columns she remembers an Excel artist creating stunning cherry blossom landscapes within the data cells he points at a logarithmic table garage door beach house she shells data sells.

Pastoralism now inland coast turned causeway they pass a Train Simulator en route to a Farming Simulator paddock bordering a Factory simulation game wherein a simulation simulator loads a simulacra model of what pastoral fields used to look like not the sort from video game landscapes that brought them here to paint and create but perhaps the idea the game designer had of what a nice meadow would look like a childhood memory where the copy is the original sacrament.

A river laps over a tumble of stones within view of a roadside pause where our couple tread out and float cheeks to the horizon knees to the mesophere and then she turns and says this is not a pool and he agrees this is not a pool this is not a reference sure perhaps a movie here or there with a dip in a river a book a poem a Norman Rockwell painting shirt hung on a hanger attached to a stonewall a handkerchief with spectacles atop or a Norman Lindsay river nymph phantasm.

Sundown across the corridor home they wonder if they are just a couple of thirty something retrobates at heart stuck looking backwards caught up in nostalgorithms feeding on playlists of memories that do not seem to be their recollections alone rather a collective sense of if you remember this you will love this like how the new generation of Simpsons writers tried to write jokes like those they grew up on but they used a copier belonging to Warhol and the punchlines just faded away.

Upstairs at their second floor apartment double hung white wooden frames catching last light the poseable mannequin spirit bottle with daisy in on the windowsill looking at the old rail line where a carpet of grass is rediscovering sugar they look at a game to play tonight dystopian cyberpunk or pastoral Aesop animal fables the feedback loop synthesising refractions of economic big data no turn away all civilisations graduate towards ordered figures so choose entropy as yet unimagined.