Illustration and Forensic Fictioning : A Speculative Counter-History of the Birmingham Central Library

This book applies illustration methods to investigate our relationship to, and occupation of, place within and through the virtual, exploring how digital imaging technologies have the potential to transform our relationship to the landscape.

At a time when brutalist buildings such as the - now demolished - Birmingham Central Library are at risk of being lost or forgotten, this book explores the possibilities of an expanded illustration practice in compiling a representation (or speculative counter-history) of a building as a multi-layered and multi-temporal site. It asks: how might illustrators utilise the archaeological possibilities of cyberspace to re- imagine our relationship to sites that no longer exist? Can the distortion of brutalism, experienced via new technologies, impact our ability to speculate on the ‘other/xeno’ political and narrative possibilities of place? In the broadest terms this is an attempt to illustrate a world where ruins might become utopias, where history is written to alter the future, where new narratives are constructed, and where archaeology and futurism merge.

Gareth Proskourine-Barnett employs a series of essayistic auto-fictions, where storytelling weaves together conflicting narrative arcs that disrupt what we perceive to be real in relation to the history of a site