Columbia 1984

Since a young age all I wanted to do was draw. Now having grown, it seems almost impossible to make a living from such an innocent act of pleasure. From publishing, advertising, marketing, to licensing; almost none of these apply to actual craft of creating anything you saw or imagined or were taught. - = - = - = - Of the latest of presentable pieces of painting-like pencil art put together for public eyes before you is this which is my last of the Bioshock: Sea of Dreams drawings. In no way do I have copy right to the Bioshock franchise under the company 2K Games, thus all of my art falls under fan-art game ideas. Yet fret not, for lest myself become directly involved with said video-game corporation, there's always hope. Preferably, my wish is to dream a better dream and draw a better drawing. Unfortunately, as it is said I'm a day late and a dollar short but on with the art-show. The point of this drawing was to give life to what would be the end of the world as we knew it, on the date that was December 31st of the year 1983; in no where other than New York City itself. Headline's read that night across every billboard, newspaper, and television: "Sky City Attacks on New Year's Eve!"

Ultimately I take things in a different direction, maybe not one all too realistic and yet possible no less. With this, my imagination created a Columbia (the sky city) in the year after warring upon "the sodom below". In victory, the reckoning was collecting the Earth's greatest achievements of the industrial revolution and left behind all else in ruins with the final frontier of space to look on to. In this scene of so much going's on's, the viewer may find a Handy Man - essentially a cyborg - from 1912 gazing upon a newer model with his girlfriend about to see a movie. Also witnessing from a short distance is a classical Columbia couple set in their ways, looking down on the romance of a girl and a mechanical boy. Above them you'll see another pair riding the rail ways that make up for much of the transportation connecting the city's floating neighborhoods, in the airways behind them a police chase gives way as Songbird - the city of Columbia's equivalent to a Big Daddy - blasts through the sky with enhancements advancing it's suit's flight capabilities. Where it is 1984 in this scene of Columbia, the world below is set back to the stone age of broken buildings and craters where once stood small-towns and cities. Though the metropolis that is the sky-city before you may amaze, I wish to point out one small factor that despite having moved forward the quality of technology - that the darker nature of the sky-city's american exceptionalism gives way to human depravity beyond inconsideration but rather 'deconsideration' of outside life from the city. Take note of course the youth playing outside of the arcade hall; in our actual history, video games where happening all throughout the seventies and eighties up till today. In that time, a game came about through several version's, from "Westward Ho!" to "General Re-Treat": the arcade game is none other than Custard's Revenge. So of course, Columbia being the all-american exceptionalism that it is, the youth take to playing such games of controversy that would be contraband in our world.

There was even a moment in Bioshock Infinite where the dimension-tearing Elizabeth opens a would-be wormhole in the sky-city to a movie theater that read: "Revenge of the Jedi". The story is that the portal enters to France, Paris, which is where the character had always dreamed of seeing one day, and that Revenge of the Jedi was going to be the title of what ended up being "Return of the Jedi". So instead of Elizabeth (in the blue dress below) opening a tear to Paris to watch the new Star Wars movie, I'd like to imagine it was actually to Columbia, after claiming the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty, ensuing the production of an alternate-reality space western in a different dimension of time. COLUMBIA 1984; graphite and coloring pencil upon paper 11 inches by 8 inches. December 18th, 2017.