Tron Star Civilization丨The Amusement Park of Idealists

This record is hidden in a hard drive sent by a designer for repair. With the recovery of the data, a history that has not been revealed gradually emerges - but perhaps it is inaccurate to call it history, because it only happened to a man on Earth. Thoughts and imaginations in the mind.

Later generations generally refer to it as the first invasion of the earth by the Tron civilization. This is not an invasion of arms and artillery fire in any sense, it is an invasion of a state, an invasion of idealism into the normal order of the earth. As a result, the order of "more and less", "being and nothing" began to become blurred.

The following parts are the recovered images from the above mentioned hard drives:

Marshall Marceau ended his day at work.

His performance was fantastic. People flocked, packed the theater, and enjoyed his pantomimes with delight. The newspapers were full of stories about him, and there were pictures of him everywhere—the face covered in white paint. The media praised him highly, saying that his physical performances succeeded in a subtle representation of "people" that were both highly abstract and extremely precise.

As usual every day, the audience gave a long clapping and then left. The stage curtain fell.

In the silence, Marcel Marceau sat alone on the stage, looking around and seeing his world in black and white. It was at this moment that he remembered that he had not forgotten how to dream.

He began to vaguely remember dreams from a long time ago. He couldn't tell if he was dreaming or dreaming about himself, but he remembered that there was a place in there that people called "Tron" or "Uqbal". All he could recall was that there was a planet there, and the realm on it was crowded with idealists.

Just when he wanted to try to forget this absurd memory, those things appeared. At first, it would not be easy for him to perceive it, just some very small, very mundane, and very small things. A chair, a table, some unnamed colors, some light and bright light. But then they start to replicate, they start to expand, they start to swell, they start to stretch, they start to multiply, they start to explode.

It was here that Marshall Marceau found his own amusement park.

The editor of the encyclopedia who compiled Tronology tried to interpret it this way: amusement parks are continuous and temporal, not strictly spatialized. For poetic necessity, these "rides" are evoked in one moment and then dissipated.

The number of facilities is 23, but the experience of amusement is practically endless. Collectively, they are a series of mental operations; they do not develop in space, but are produced continuously in time, and are continuously derived.

Tron's intrusion can be said to challenge the traditional "reality-imagination" binary relationship, and the black-and-white dichotomy has become vulnerable in an instant. For Tron's civilization, reality is about what is present (image formation), such as perception and awareness; while imagination is about what is not present, such as memory and creation. Through antonyms and contradictions, a vocabulary can produce a series of new concepts (eg, black-white-not black-not-white). They form a dynamic field, very much like a series of mirrors lined up, continuously reproducing the images in the other mirrors. A poetic image generation of an object that is neither present nor future or past, it exists in fiction, it is a symbol.

Image by: Yalun Li, Graduate of Architecture, Harvard University, Bachelor of Architecture, Minor in Philosophy, Syracuse University

The original work was published on the WeChat public account of "Dune Research Institute", original title: Dune Design丨Harvard GSD's most "cult style" design studio

Similarly, the work was uploaded on Douban album, original title: Borges Amusement Park

*The copyright of the image works belongs to the Dune Research Institute, please contact the author for all commercial reprints