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ORIGINAL
PAINTING
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All Paintings & Prints
can be supplied in
"ready to hang"
handmade and
hand-embellished
"Artist
Frames"
One
of the pioneering illustrations from the 90's series of short Dark Science
Fiction stories that appeared on the web a decade or so ago that formed
a prototype electronic commerce project with Barclays bank in the UK.
At that time, it was impossible to trade in small amounts of money
electronically over the web and the Bank was experimenting with the
idea of a downloadable electronic wallet for use with a credit card.
Peter wrote and illustrated the stories that were encrypted web pages
synced to the "Barclaycoin" technology, and it worked!
At the end of the project the stories lay dormant until recently, when
we decided to assemble them into a book.
"The
stories are set in a post-consumer boom environment (the Artist
correctly predicted the current financial crisis ) and revolve around
the emotional traumas experienced by ordinary people suddenly finding
themselves cut-off from their daily fix of "urban adrenalin rush" and
how the personalities and behavior of inhabitants of the consumer
citadel become extended, enlarged, and balloon to grotesque levels."The
idea came to me one morning as I cut through my small local shopping
centre in Wimbledon to the station to go to a meeting and a lady with a
child in a baby-buggy, who was the only other occupant of the ground
floor we were on, as it was very early, just after opening tine, and
she was SO fixated on the ATM machine I was passing, she cut diagonally
across the concourse, from her position totally on the opposite side of
it to me, and accelerated at speed, pushing the buggy, collided with
the wall on my side of the concourse, turned to almost run, with the
buggy, parallel to the wall and I just knew, knew, what she was going
to do next, which was to mow me down, on her panic-stricken race to
reach the ATM machine close to where I was walking. As she aggressively
attempted to drive the buggy up the front of my body and scalp me with
the axles I extricated myself at speed, sideways, but the closely
following utterance of "Sowwy, sowwy, sowwy, so sowwy" was actually
quite amusing because I could tell she wasn't an assassin and really
had only one thing exclusively on her mind, the ATM, and I was
invisible, screened-out of her consciousness by fear, so desperate was
her plight for cash. "As
it happened, the ATM denied her the cash and she spun 'round, heading
for the exit shrieking "it's not fair, it's not fair", her dream of
morning cappuccino dashed by her bank's denial of credit, I assumed."I
sat on the train a little while later, pondering how much stress
ordinary people can carry, and what might happen if there were
absolutely no limits to how it might affect their behavior."Killer Robots who hunt down people over their credit limits Aliens who invade Earth, because we'd unwittingly used their decendents to build our lifestyles.Revengeful
gangs of giant insects that ride motorcyles, super-bugs, evolved from
those left to fend for themselves in abandoned Californian pools of
sub-prime mortgaged houses left abandoned by fleeing mortgage debtors.The
"real world" starts to take revenge on the inhabitants of the consumer
citadel who failed to see the consequences of oversize pizzas . . . . .
. ."Dark and bleak though the stories are, they do have a bit of a twist of humour."12 short stories = "12 screams from the near future" (that finally arrived . . . . }
See it in this
Collector's Edition book
