The Real World?

The camera takes in a broad landscape of low, smoky-blue hills, with a perfectly clear, bright blue sky above. Here and there a window obliquely flashes back the sun, as the point-of-view zooms forward and down, into a new suburb of an Australian city. The houses here are all recent, as the swamps and fields are filled and turned into housing estates, and the camera sees that many of them still have no lawns or fences. Dogs and children play in the streets and yards. In a continuing long zoom – the viewer is made vertiginously conscious of the unnatural changes of perspective – the camera slides up a short street, to a limestone-brick house with green-framed windows and a shiny corrugated steel roof. One window is open, and the viewer is carried into an untidy study, dominated by a computer surrounded by stacks of CD-ROMs and floppy disks.