Earlier this year I received a letter from Gerald Murnane, typed on his Remington Monarch typewriter his wife bought him in 1965. In it, he told me that he believes the concept of time does not exist, that, quote, what we call time is our confused perception of place after place. How do we interpret this sentiment - that consciousness is a series of spatial experiences that we perceive sequentially only because of our cognitive limitations and habits? Perhaps when we look back on our memories, we are not travelling back in time so much as we are visiting places in our mind, without a definite chronology.

In the park across the road from where I live, there is a little building called the Glass House. It used to house flowers and ferns that were grown by gardeners employed by the local council to be then planted in beds around the park. Now it is becoming increasingly dilapidated in what could be seen as a strategic move by the powers that be to let it become an eyesore and then, one day, readily demolished without a fuss. That’s the cynic in me talking, because I adore the Glass House and want it to remain in the park forever. I might employ Murnane’s philosophy here to comfort me and consider that the Glass House is not getting older, it is simply moving from one place into another kind of place in my mind, and the mind of those in our community who give it spatial attention.

The park has been undergoing redevelopments of different stripes across the decade. Ten years ago, nearly to the day, the Bowling Club that sat in the park was shut down and set for demolition. Today, half the park is fenced off and an old brick building that housed a giant chessboard on one side and toilets on the other began to have its roof removed. When I caught wind that plans to further renovate the park were in progress, I decided to take inspiration from a news article I read a couple of years ago in which South Sea Islanders used photogrammetry to create a structural record of significant buildings in the community. Photogrammetry is the science of extracting three-dimensional data from photographs, by overlapping images of an object or space and converting them into rendered models.

They look like a caramelised version of reality to me, or perhaps like a building deep fried and then set to rest in a state of static melting. You can use most modern phones or tablets that have LiDAR (Light Detecting and Ranging), like Apple devices, to scan an object in this way and produce an augmented result. That’s what I did, in the videos you can see on this page. I now have versions of the Glass House that I can ‘walk’ around in a virtual capacity or even use a 3D printer to create a small model version of the house (or, I suppose, print a real size version, as 3D printed homes are now a thing).

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, recently (or, in one space and another), and about the idea of what happens when nothing ever really comes to an end. This is what the promise of digitalisation brings, like the render of the Glass House in that video above. The actual building might be demolished by the time I return to the park for my next wander, but the virtual version will always remain so long as this technological age keeps on. There is something crucial about endings, though - I don’t believe I would value a piece of music that never concluded (Ned Markosian’s philosophical notion about the physics of Sideways Music might be an interesting aside here).

Some years ago, I listened to a podcast episode that shared a touching story involving a girl who had a beloved grandmother who passed away and then, as a way of processing her grief, decided to recreate her grandmother in the video game The Sims. At first, it was a therapeutic way of still being able to interact and communicate with her grandmother, and the girl made sure to turn off aging inside the game so her virtual grandmother would never age and never pass away. However, in time she realised that interacting with the avatar of her grandmother in this way did not bring the happiness and relief it once did: an ending was required to give value to what she loved about her grandmother, and so she turned on the setting within the game that would allow the characters to age. Soon after, her grandmother died in the game, and this time, in a controlled and anticipated environment, the girl was able to grieve in a manner that mediated her feelings towards her grandmother more fully than the shock of her real-life passing.

I think this is a profound consideration and one that strikes at the heart of foreverism: what do we make of a culture, a memory, with no endpoint? We live in an age of cinematic and narrative sequels and multiverses that promise there will always be more to the story, but this wasn’t always the case. Novels and movies used to finish with no expectation of a follow-up. If you wanted the characters to keep living beyond the final scene you needed to conjure a fantasy in your mind. There is something about the nature of ontological incompleteness that feels resonant here - those gaps in the universe that never get filled in.

As Zizek has analogised the idea, this Hegelian breach is like a building in a video game that is never meant to be entered, it is just a decorative set piece: the building doesn’t contain anything inside, because it would have been a waste of the programmers time to do so. So too the critical gap that comes after the conclusion of a story, in which the characters exist beyond the boundaries of the narrative only, exclusively, in your mind, not in any actual media, with no potential to manifest into endless follow-up media timelines like the twenty-five years of spin-offs and bizarro merchandising and train networks and multi-timeverse narratives spawned by the Neon Genesis series.

In this way, perhaps my virtual photogrammetry of the Glass House is going about things in the wrong way, trying to foreverise something that only has value because of the space it occupies in the here and now. It might be better to build some destructive code into the render so that it dissolves and fractures the binary components of the file gradually over time - digital degradation - a virtual equivalent in the spirit of what Bansky did with his artwork shredder. Each time the video of the Glass House loops it could be a bit more glitchy and faded, like a Warhol print photocopied too many times (or just enough) to signify transience.