Flicking through TV channels, brushing their teeth before bed, and so on. The scene is by far Islands’ most mundane, as apart from where the homes emerge, it depicts nothing more than people going about their nightly routine. By contrast, people coming home to their apartments hidden beneath a parking lot feels normal. Likewise the moments where Islands delves into the mystic – luggage beginning gallop on an airport’s baggage pickup, for instance – achieve a similar sense of wonder and intrigue. They take something seemingly natural and nondescript and make it fascinating and worthy of close study. Watching eggs file off a bus or trees ascend an escalator is strange but alluring in how it repurposes the mundane into something new and interesting. The latter in particular feels especially surreal because of how normal it is. Apartments emerge from parking spaces, their residents going about their lives completely unconcerned about the inherent strangeness of these circumstances. A hotel lobby starts to rain, the room steadily becoming flooded while a siren wails, the plants and furniture climbing upward to avoid the rising tide. Clicking on one when they pulsate causes the space to change. Your main form of interaction with these scenes are through pulsating lights.

It lulls you in by letting you take in the space in its most mundane and unassuming form before beginning to transform it, allowing you to appreciate the subtle beauty of these locales in their normal state. The leap to the surreal isn’t instantaneous. A pair of escalators carry palm trees that stop for a shower before continuing upward, for instance, or eggs stepping off a bus to take refuge in a bus stop that becomes an incubator. Each scene offers up a seemingly normal space and transforms it with a bit surrealism. Islands: Non-Places from Carl Burton is an examination of those oft-forgotten spots, these utilitarian pieces of architecture, that imbues them with a touch of magic. Transitory spaces where our minds wander or we distract ourselves with our phones while we wait to reach our true destination. Places we spent a fair amount of time passing through, but never pay any attention to. Bus stops, parking lots, lobbies, and so on. What are “non-places”? They’re the spaces we filter through so often that we pay them no mind.

Darkest dungeon siren theme