I'd acquired Peter Bialobrzeski's book, neontigers, a few years ago but I've only recently had the chance to play Mirror's Edge which proved to be an often tachycardic, at times frustrating (attributed to my lack of platforming skills) but ultimately rewarding experience. While the creators probably drew lots of inspiration from New York (in terms of street layout) and Tokyo (cf. here; the G-CANS drainage system etc) when designing the game's landscape, its clean, bright, geometric and futurist look also reminded me of megacities like Singapore and Shanghai as I had previously seen them presented in the photographs of Bialobrzeski.
(1)
"Neon is a natural product. And it is a rare one. Its concentration in the atmosphere is 1.8 x 10-3 by volume percent, or put more simply: 0.002 percent - this is all that exists of the gas, at least on our planet. Synthetic manufacturing? Impossible. That is the wonderful thing about neon light in its classic form: although it represents complete artificiality and cold modernity (very different from the twinkling gas lanterns in Julius Rodenberg's Paris), the raw material for neon tubes cannot be artificially manufactured.
The same applies to Peter Bialobrzeski's magical photographs in Neon Tigers. They too are - so to speak - from a natural source. Although they appear to be digital fiction, they are analogue. No mouse click has ever interfered with them, no picture editing has calculated them. Like neon lights, Bialobrzeski's images only give a hint of the chaos beneath their surface. The crowds that make their way through these megacities are often as invisible as the streams of electrons in the lamps that begin to glow on collision with the gas atoms. Because people are rare in these photo-graphs, the spectator's gaze is drawn to the artificial light. Sometimes the neon lights of Asia radiate from Bialobrzeski's pictures as if the concentration of 1.8 x 10-3 by volume percent were glowing all at once."
(peter bialobrzeski: neontigers. scanned and cropped. 1-3 singapore, 4-5 shenzen, 6-8 shanghai. introduction quoted from press text.)(2)
"If you lose yourself in the images in Neon Tigers, you can imagine the photographer as a kind of flying eye. Childlike fantasies are conjured up: of a man who is floating through canyons of high-rise buildings, defying gravity, without limits - like in a PlayStation universe."
(dice: mirror's edge. in-game shots from various sources such as.looks magnificent in motion!)
