Do you remember the first colour you ever saw? For artist Zima, that colour was the blue tiles of a swimming pool. Love, Death, and Robots is a Netflix series of sci-fi shorts and Zima Blue is the last episode of Volume One. The story of Zima Blue is a beautiful one in which I am deeply captivated by both its aesthetic and philosophical qualities.
The story follows an enigmatic artist named Zima who in the far future attracts a worldwide following of his mural artwork. Zima started his art career in portraiture; but the urge to search for deeper meaning led him to look further to the cosmos itself and that’s how the mural work started. Over time the artist’s murals begin featuring a blue square in the middle of the canvas. Starting with a tiny blue square in the centre of the canvas, over the next several decades the blue square becomes more dominant until Zima unveils an entirely blue mural.
Then the artist presents his final work—a swimming pool. It is then revealed that the artist’s existence began as a simple robot designed to clean the blue tiles of a swimming pool. Over time the robot underwent various modifications, adding on new features and technologies and “with every iteration it became more alive.” Consciousness, great intelligence, awareness and mind capacity cannot fill the void within the artist. After decades of searching for truth the artist knows what has to be done. Zima the artist immerses himself into the swimming pool he rebuilt with the blue tiles. As he does, he slowly shuts down his higher brain functions. The artist’s last words are, “…un-making myself, leaving just enough to appreciate my surroundings.”
I am deeply captivated by the artist’s performance of immersing into the water, disassembling himself, and enjoying the simple pleasure offered by the surroundings. I love cities. In my years of studying, researching, and working in the field of urban studies, my passion toward cities grows and so does my knowledge. The knowledge. We are trained to see and study the city through various lenses—the city as marketplace (space of exchange of information and commodities), the city as an assemblage, the city as organism, as nervous system, as a laboratory, as an archive, as text, language, and speech, as performativity…and the list goes on. Studying the city and urbanity through these lenses is and has always been a thrilling and exciting adventure.
But Zima the artist sends me a reminder. The urban environments. Urban environments are clusters of mediated information and sensory experience. In my gracefully-frantic search to understand cities and to apply and witness theories, I at times neglect the urban environment itself. The urban is also understood through the senses and the sensory experience urban environments offer is immense.
So tonight as I take a walk in the city I let go of my thoughts on insurgent urbanism, performative urbanism, ecological urbanism, splintering urbanism…. I, following the artist, shut down my thoughts and leave just enough to appreciate the urban surroundings. As I look up I am pleased to know that I can still extract some simple pleasure from the urban environments. The vintage neon signage is my Zima blue—the simplicity—in the city.
Figure 1. Archambault Musique. Image source: Judy Chen. Montréal, 2021.
Figure 2. Miss Villeray Café. Image source: Judy Chen. Montréal, 2021.
Figure 3. Château Lafeyette. Image source: Judy Chen. Ottawa, 2021.
I couldn’t decide whether my fascination toward the city is because of what the city is or how the city works. This fascination I carry with me, I know, is a precise thing.
