Unbuilt Environments 2024

Unbuilt Environments 2024

(Animation and multi-screen video installation)

Museum with display of "horror" wheelchairs from video gaming object libraries. In the foreground, a woman takes a selfie with a grungy wheelchair.

Unbuilt Environments was commissioned by UCL’s Trellis public art programme and UCL Research, based at Global Disability Innovation Hub at the university’s east London campus at Stratford, and made over the course of a year in consultation with local disabled people and disabled-led groups. I also worked closely throughout this period with researcher and disability activist Anna Landre, also based at GDIH and UCL. We continued to test the work and consult with disabled people right through the exhibition’s run, which was March-April 2024 at Hoxton Hall in east London as part of the Field Works exhibition.

Concurrently a single screen version was on at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen during the Danish documentary film festival CPH:DOX in the INTER:ACTIVE group exhibition called Who Do You Think You Are: The Body Reexamined. You can read about this exhibition in a Filmmaker magazine article, and at Modern Times Review.

Using our consultations with disabled people who have many different lived experiences of disability – from blindness and visual impairment to movement disabilities, and “invisible” disabilities – and inspired by the architectural renderings and virtual fly-throughs used by property developers in regenerating areas like Stratford and the Olympic Park area in London, I used Unreal Engine to build representations of our participants’ utopian and dystopian ideas about the built environment, in the style of architectural visualisations and fly-throughs, and using stock architectural figures. There was only one visibly disabled person in the library, and in fact you can probably see her multiple times even in the few images that are on this page! She became a kind of easter egg, because I ended up putting her somewhere in every scene.

(Another “fun” fact: the depressing, alienating tower lived in by the lonely, emotionally unavailable protagonist of Andrew Haigh’s film All of Us Strangers is right in the centre of this area… which gives you some idea of the vibe, if you’ve seen the film but not been to the Olympic Park recently.)

The result is a constantly changing multi-screen video installation of these scenes, interspersed with synthetic human faces reacting to them and to their own inner emotional lives.

Above: Excerpt from Unbuilt Environments: Excess Deaths. Each person in a wheelchair who falls into the space between two buildings is roughly equal to the number of disabled and ill people who died prematurely in East London boroughs every month as a result of the UK government’s austerity measures in the early 2020s.

“Quite sad and sorry not to have thought about it more before. So, I’m also enlightened.”
“Makes me want more pleasure-centred spaces for joy.”
“As able bodied people we often forget how privileged we are that the world is built for us.”

Examples of the many positive and thoughtful comments left by visitors

Above: Excerpt from Unbuilt Environments: Accessibility Audit. Museum of disability receives a non-normatively shaped visitor.

Animation stills from Unbuilt Environments on this page by Alistair Gentry 2023-2024.

All installation photography from Field Works at Hoxton Hall, east London, by Kirsten Holst for UCL Trellis, 2024.

Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Two screens on black stands, one showing a Black woman's face with a neutral expression, the other showing wheelchairs on display in a white cube art gallery. Beneath and behind the screens, a tangle of electrical wires.
Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Wide shot of five differently sized screens on black stands, in a white-painted Victorian hall with a polished wooden floor.
An museum with a giant guide dog exhibit in the foreground; in the background is a full-sized tyrannosaurus rex with a man looking at it calmly.
Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Medium shot of five differently sized screens on black stands, in a white-painted Victorian hall with a polished wooden floor.
Computer rendering of people in a cavernous, Brutalist waiting room with overhead fluorescent lights.
Computer rendering of a Brutalist concrete interior with surrealist proliferations of steep and dangerous staircases receding into the darkness.
Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Closeup shot of four differently sized screens on black stands. Three of the screens show a white man's face with three different expressions, and the fourth shows a neon sign that says HELP THE ABLED.
Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Closeup of one screen on its stand, showing a Black woman's face looking curiously to one side.
Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Closeup of tangled white electric cables plugged into a power strip.
Installation view of Unbuilt Environments, photographed by Kirsten Holst. Closeup of one screen on its stand, showing a tyrannosaurus rex roaring against a flat raspberry red background.
Montage of three computer generated faces against a white background: a white man looking amazed, an Asian woman crying, and a Black woman looking over to her left.
A computer render of a London street in the early evening time, showing a disabled parking place and pedestrians going about their business. People in wheelchairs have begun falling into a vacant lot between two buildings. In the foreground, a skip is on fire.