Digital Rendering of a House in Belarus

This won’t answer everything. I don’t know if anyone really deserves an explanation – we don’t care to evangelise and we don’t care that you don’t understand – but you’ve deigned to ask and so I must oblige. But believe me you won’t be the last.

As I make this transcript I realise I’m adding a fourth artefact to the three that already tell the same story – this transcript, Stephen’s dictaphone tapes, the anonymous photographer’s polaroids and, of course, Julian’s digital model. All but the first, the model, are irrelevances, and this is by far the most vulgar. Everything you really need to understand is present in that – all our research amounted to was the realisation of this fact. Stephen’s recordings are just a gloss on that process and this document a gloss on that. The pictures are little more than an ugly afterthought but they brought us to the diagram, so I guess they had their use. Have you seen them? Don’t.

Recording 13 – 10:49 – December Twenty First, 2002 – a computer lab belonging to a small town polytechnic, somewhere near the Scottish border.

Sliding door access above entry ramp. Too small for a car, likely suited to small goods conveyances.

Two ancillary segments to the right and left of the central spire. Function unclear. Review dimensions of stairwell.

Central spire: No indication of curvature. Could be housing for the central atrium. No other segments seem large enough.

It’s like a vision of Hell

That last voice on the tape is my own. That such a structure was ever fashioned is not a matter of common knowledge, but the life it had taken on in our minds was by then very real to us indeed, and every bit as detailed as that diagram. In that moment, three months into our investigation it felt like and end point – the turning of the final shovel load that brings up the bodies. It was not. But it marked the end of the first phase, at least.

Steven had scrutinised every centimetre of it, poring over every pixel. The scattered iterations of white and grey and mussel-flesh orange – that synthesis of cheapmarble and aluminium. Affordances for pipes and wires other such necessities. But it all sounds so dry like this. I couldn’t describe to you the sensation of seeing the thing from all angles.

There was no comfortable distance to do so, you see. Too close and the pixels swim and burgeon like disturbed insects. Too far and an unexpected pang of loneliness seemed unavoidable. It was just there. Alone in an uninterrupted digital landscape of simulated grass and sky, with spring flowers spilling outward in fractal arrays. These blossoms of silicone – these fruiting bodies of artificial daisies. A vision of hell indeed.

And hell, as you should know, is always personal. The world first learned of the House in Belarus when an anonymous poster had uploaded five images to an architecture forum. They showed various angles of a digital model of a house. It was on so many levels an ugly thing – like a debasement of Frank Lloyd-Wright. One might have called it functional, and there could have perhaps been beauty in that were it possible to conceive of any function that such a building might have served. Most of the responses were amusement – others backhandedly admired its defiance to convention and taste. To Stephen and myself, however, it had a different importance: it was the last place we’d seen Julian alive.

The pictures then. The ones that arrived anonymously to Julian’s old office before they reached us, alerting us to his thirteen month absence. I’ll use Stephen’s description – it seems the most concise. It was the first of his many tapes – back when his obsessive recording seemed simply an affectation and not the primary focus of his research – that is, what you might have heard described as experiments in what he called auto-divination – the ones I didn’t know about. This was before my faith was still a rational one [sic]. And before he started to sound just like Julian had done.

Recording 2. Stephen’s flat, South London. Time, undisclosed.

Thirty nine images in all. Date stamp indicates a period between June and early July 2001. Honestly, they could be anywhere from 1969 onwards.

The first couple A minibus of men and women, young mostly, wearing slacks and buttoned down shirts. Disembarking – national park, maybe? They’re eating lunch at picnic tables. Later there’s a large compound surrounded by a chain link fence. Most likely a campsite.Number 8 – the first of any real significance. Shows a large glade in a bowl of densely wooded hills. This is where we first see the building. First impression – not right. Like it reflects light wrong. But the design itself is…

[and then there is a pause]

Wrong. Like if you magine a dinosaur crudely edited into frame – that’s the best way I can put it.

Number 9: black – blocked by a lens cap left on, or perhaps taken at night.

Number 10: Overexposed.

Number 11: The field again, evidently around the same time. You can see the people in it now. Standing at a distance. Impression of a pattern. Clothes – different from earlier pictures. They’re all facing away. No sign of movement.

Number 12: Interior, somewhere without windows. Three men, lying against a wall or squatting down, looking exhausted, but happy. Always happy. Look closely – the flash brings up swatches of black mold growing along the walls. They go on like this.

Number 21. This one is really something else. Also overexposed but enough detail visible detail to discern a prone figure in an open space – interior, now. Looks like large room under a skylight. Probably the same cylindrical chamber that featured in a number of those later shots. I’ve come to call it ‘The Atrium’ for want of a better term.

22, 23, 24 – More night shots. Black, but the lens is definitely not covered this time. It strikes me that we may be that we were witnessing someone’s ill-fated attempt to photograph a passing plane.

25, 26, 28, more innocuous shit.

29 is indoors again – first confirmed dead. There are so many more than we thought. Mostly outside, or in the central atrium.

Number 32 – nine or so persons leaning against the walls of a narrow corridor. Can confirm that these are, once more, different people.

34 is my favourite, though. Looks like a severed head lying on the ground. Would you believe it’s almost comical? It’s like something out of a Victorian daguerreotype. A reluctant second glance, though, and you’ll see it’s still attached. His eyes are open for god’s sake. It looks like he’s rising from somewhere below. And take a look at the angles.

And take a look I did, when I could eventually bring myself to look at them. That was after much persuasion from Steven. It was significant because that was the first time we’d even considered there might be a basement. There were more, those that I didn’t care to study too long – Steven’s detachment from all this was admirable. Then there was a picture apparently out of sequence with these others. That’s the only one I could bring myself to keep. It shows five men gathered around a wall chart. The clock shows three fifteen, as does the timestamp. And they’re smiling. Not the rictus grin of their fellows on the ground in the other shots, but expressions born of genuine elation. And I found myself smiling in turn.

It was stephen who first pointed out the figure centre right. That smiling face of a hooded man in his mid thirties who closely resembled Julian. Julian whom Stephen and I had known at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, whose artwork had seemed outlandish long before it seemed trite. Whom we had not seen in nearly two years, and about whom we now began to harbour grave concerns.

There was one final image – the time stamp showed 6:00 on the morning of July 8th. It was the exterior of the building. The then and still unknown building. This one showed the thing in the most detail – those uniquely functionless architectures that would henceforth become the principle object of Stephen’s investigations, even before such questions of location or ownership proved definitively futile. But even after the screenshots emerged and the digital ghost of that building would come to haunt us, even after the fateful trip to Scotland. Even then, it didn’t occur to us that Julian would have had some role in its design.

After we got back from Scotland we went our separate ways, following up acquaintances with promises to meet in the new year. That meeting never happened, but we kept in close contact those first few months. Of Julian’s once prolific artwork, surprisingly little seemed to have survived. We spoke to journalists who’d attended private exhibitions of his increasingly cryptic works. Heard descriptions of films he’d screened that lacked a ‘strong aesthetic awareness’. We learned of uncomfortable scenes at parties, the death by overdose of a sometime collaborator, a minor police incident around February 1994. The unveiling of a model town populated by grasshoppers. A sudden interest in computers towards the end of the decade.

But all this you already knew, because if you’re asking then I assume you read that damned article. Back when I thought bringing the affair to the attention of the public would warrant anything but pain. But I did look for a physical house for a while. And I started with the pictures.

England seemed too small to hide something like this. Too many eyes, and too many roads. We’d heard about strange things happening out in Wales – hippies going out west and going weird out amongst the valleys back in the ‘60s. Perhaps there was some hangover of the new age scene. The fascination of the UFO. Shades of Rendlesham. The words ‘Black Ops Site’ rang through our minds. And we wondered for the time whether the house was not in fact a research facility, or perhaps a church.

We’d long ago decided that Belarus was a misnomer. It was too much like one of a number of disconnected places that populated Julian’s later works: The Nepalese Garden’ and ‘The Chapel in Salzburg’, ‘The Embassy of Frinton on Sea’. Together they formed a weird geography – a coded series of names whose mythology seemed all their own. Perhaps there was a house in Belarus somewhere that formed the basis for it, analogous in some thematic or functional capacity. Between the pictures and the model there seemed to be space for many more. A copy of a copy. A plague of recursions.

It was around then I started to follow suit with Stephen. Start making my own recordings, that I would listen back through, obsessively. And, crucially, begin making a model of my own.You see, the digital model – the one we were now certain was Julian’s creation – showed only the exterior, but in the cache that we took back with us from Scotland, there had been hints of something else. There were scraps of code, corrupted sub-files, notes, suggestion that these formed part of a corresponding model that contained the lower reaches of the complex. Of these was something Stephen called ‘the outer forms’. This referred to five, squat blocks that radiated from the bulk of the complex in an asymmetric pattern. He deduced they must be vents belying an even greater substructure of tunnels.

It was from these that I began my first steps towards replication. Successfully, as it would happen. What I found is something I’ve reiterated to a number of times to your predecessors, though always inadequately, after the first, I’ve found.

I henceforth include the transcript:

Recording number 89 – New Years Day, 2003 – Location: Kent. Time: 2AM

Reconstruction of picture 31 – the angle of a strip light set into the sloping walls through the doorway leading down from the central atrium in picture number seventeen, distance twenty three metres. The light refracted from the upper floor through the grill in the ceiling of the corridor in picture number nine, distance, eighteen metres. No purpose. No unity of form, no golden ratio. Only angles. Note thick aluminium pipe snaking around the perimeter of the lower atrium in picture number twenty one and number of stairs counted upon the staggered vent that runs alongside the maintenance lift in picture number twenty two. Reckoning by array of ventilation towers clustered towards northern point: design asymmetrical. The lowest point corresponds to here, close but not directly beneath maintenance tower furthest out towards the compound’s northwestern perimeter.

Figures in picture 36: upside down. Ceiling pictured is in fact floor. The light is not a reflection. Blood depicted has not coagulated – this is not a mistake, a manipulation, or a corruption of the film. Other shapes unknown – biological qualities now visible, definite and disturbing. Julian’s mathematical statements confirm details up to this point. And nothing beyond what is undeniable: That is, the lowest point is also the highest.

One can only imagine what it’s like to be there. This vision of Hell, this lowest point where all the world’s suffering gathers like silt – a sedimentary layer of river mud – gazing up from through all that is material. You knew it would be here, Stephen. You found it first, after all.

Recording 40 – the last – now [date unspecified] – time of recording: late

Julian is still there. In a sense he always was. He found it first, after all. I know because I’m there, too, now, and so is Steven – though he went a little further. That day he went out to the site. Drove his car up that impossible mound of pulverised materiel. Uttered his last into the dictaphone before he climbed up over the dashboard and into the sky with the ease of a diving bird.

I never got so far, but the thing we call heaven still acknowledges those who wait – who stayed pinned to the rational and the solid. And it loves them in its way – a love that cannot speak its name for fear the syllables may bleed through.

But when I’m there I speak them freely, and I am often there. I’m there when I’m unspooling the reels of tape that mark the thread of my ever narrowing existence. I’m there when I drink. I’m there when I’m recording static to cover over the sound of things I don’t, or no longer wish to remember having said. I’m there when I break open my copy of the model – the diagram of the house in Belarus – and read for Julian’s fingerprints in the raw data. When I see the walls and vents and tunnels assemble like glowing vector patterns in the endless silicone night.

But how can I say all this now? It’s hard to imagine, I know. My body is out in Thamesmead, my mind still in Scotland. But the soul I learned that I possessed only once its absence was noted – that’s with Julian, and Stephen, too, now. And one day we’ll be whole.

But I can’t say how.

I’m sorry.

[*Unless you’re the French lady who came up to me after and explained that you didn’t really follow but enjoyed the performance, and that also your friend was a transsexual (sort of losing the thread after that point), so I decided to give you the printout I was reading from to pass on as a gift.]