Cassette Futurism, Intergalactic, and the Australian Artist Who Was Already Painting Tomorrow
An excerpt from a Psionian Films documentary in development
The two images placed at the beginning of this piece belong beside one another, cautiously. They are not evidence of influence, and I would not want them presented that way. One is Dan McPharlin’s Land of the Sleeping Things, a work from 2008. The other is artwork for Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, newly released in September 2026 as the studio confirmed that its long-awaited science-fiction game will remain largely unseen for the rest of this year before receiving what Neil Druckmann describes as its full reveal in 2027. Naughty Dog has called Intergalactic its most ambitious game yet. What presently interests me, long before any question of comparison can become a question of influence, is the visual conversation that happens when the pictures are simply allowed to sit near each other. McPharlin’s traveller moves through a pale world of rust-red vegetation, shallow water, colossal organic forms and a branch so large that it becomes architecture. Naughty Dog’s solitary figure stands within another environment where organic structures have become almost cathedral-like, where the human body appears small against vertical immensities, where red growth punctuates an otherwise cooler world and where the first sensation is not action but arrival. Both pictures understand a very old science-fiction pleasure: the tiny traveller entering the incomprehensible place. Both understand that scale becomes emotional when the environment is permitted to exceed explanation. Both allow a landscape to possess a history that the human being in front of us does not yet know. Naughty Dog has told us enough about Intergalactic to make that response particularly appropriate. Jordan A. Mun is a bounty hunter who becomes stranded on Sempiria, a planet whose contact with the external universe vanished centuries earlier. Those who travelled there in the intervening period were never heard from again. In its September 2026 update, Naughty Dog said that the fuller unveiling of Jordan’s adventure will come in 2027. The comparison therefore has to remain where it belongs, in the realm of visual affinity, shared ancestry and a coincidental alignment of sensibility. Yet those affinities can still tell us something. They tell us that a particular conception of science fiction, one that has circulated through paperback illustration, animation, industrial design, record artwork, physical model-making and films for more than half a century, is preparing to step again into the centre of popular culture. They also lead back to an Australian artist who, for a remarkable period of time, seemed capable of distilling that entire tradition into single images.
The contemporary internet has settled on the phrase “cassette futurism” for part of this territory. Like many names applied retrospectively to aesthetics, it is imprecise around the edges and useful in the middle. There is no academy of cassette futurism, no manifesto signed by its practitioners and no clean date at which it began. The phrase has nevertheless become intelligible enough that a substantial online community now exists around it, sharing the imagined technologies of futures built from the physical vocabulary of roughly the 1970s and 1980s: CRT displays, tactile keys, magnetic media, switches, tape mechanisms, small LCDs, thick casings, modular components, freestanding hi-fi equipment and computers that occupy visible physical space. The dedicated Reddit community describes the aesthetic in almost exactly those terms, and third-party community tracking in 2026 puts its membership well into six figures. The University of Melbourne’s student magazine Farrago used the term in 2022 while discussing the wider attraction of obsolete technologies, describing cassette futurism as a form of retrofuturism in which yesterday’s devices continue forward into imagined tomorrows. The appeal is broader than nostalgia for a tape deck or an amber monitor. Cassette futurism gives machinery resistance. A button depresses. A cassette enters a mechanism. A reel revolves. A switch has two states separated by a physical movement. A spacecraft console resembles something that could be repaired because it appears to contain parts. The machine does not vanish behind glass. There is an almost ethical quality to that visibility now. Contemporary consumer electronics have steadily reduced the amount of their operation that can be understood from their exterior. The cassette-futurist machine advertises its operation through screws, housings, slots, levers, grilles, cables, numbered controls and screens dedicated to narrow tasks. Even where the technology is fictional, it suggests workmanship. A person seems to have constructed it, another person seems capable of opening it, and a third person has to learn how to operate it. McPharlin’s art repeatedly understood that pleasure long before “cassette futurism” became a convenient internet category. His relationship with analogue equipment went considerably deeper than decorating pictures with old synthesizers. Between 2006 and 2009 he made the Analogue Miniatures, tiny invented synthesizers, tape machines and recording devices assembled physically from humble materials including paper, framing board, string, rubber bands and cardboard. They were not replicas of existing equipment. They were speculative artefacts, machines from a parallel technological history whose forms were derived from the audio equipment of the 1970s and 1980s. If somebody wanted a single body of work demonstrating what cassette futurism can mean at its most generous, those miniatures would be an extraordinary place to begin. Their joke, if there is one, is also their tenderness. They reduce enormous fantasies of technological systems to objects that can be held in the hand. They make imaginary machinery physically real by building it from the most ordinary substances imaginable.
McPharlin was born in Adelaide in 1977, studied visual arts and developed an independent practice that moved freely between illustration, design, sculpture, sound and electronic music. Biographical material from his active period describes early modernism, surrealism, Victorian imagery and science fiction as strands within that practice. His music was never peripheral to the visual work. Synthesizers and analogue recording equipment recur because they belonged to his actual creative life, not because an art director had instructed him to make something look retro. One account of his studio practice describes electronic signals, voltages, drones, hiss, switches, patch cords and old circuitry as the sonic counterpart to his painted landscapes. In a 2010 interview, McPharlin spoke about the Commodore Amiga with the intimacy of someone for whom old computing was a creative instrument rather than a decorative reference. He remembered Deluxe Paint II, working pixel by pixel, OctaMED’s hexadecimal music tracker and the fate of ageing floppy disks containing earlier work. He was already living inside the emotional dimension that cassette futurism now formalises: the recognition that technology ages, that storage media decay, that tools disappear, that entire ways of working can become inaccessible within a single lifetime. This helps explain why his future images rarely feel like pristine demonstrations of technology. They feel remembered. A McPharlin spacecraft, console or machine often seems to have arrived from a future that is somehow already old. It may be advanced, but it carries the melancholy of an object recovered after its civilisation has changed. This quality is easy to reduce to “retro” and much harder to reproduce. Retrofuturism can become costume very quickly. Put enough knobs on a panel, distress a surface, add scanlines, and one can approximate the visual vocabulary. McPharlin’s images carry something underneath the vocabulary. They understand the emotional contradiction of retrofuturism: we can feel nostalgia for a future that never existed. The imagined object appears old because the historical moment that imagined objects like it has passed. It becomes an artefact from an abandoned tomorrow. That feeling sits close to the centre of Distant Star for me. I am interested in the artist, certainly, but I am equally interested in the strange way an artist can disappear while the visual world around him seems to move closer to his sensibility.
McPharlin was unusually articulate about where that sensibility came from. In 2014 he remembered losing himself as a child in the Terran Trade Authority books, that remarkable series of illustrated speculative volumes that used the work of painters such as Chris Foss and others to imply entire technological civilisations around fictional histories. He named Foss, Syd Mead and Roger Dean among the artists who had shaped him. He returned repeatedly to Ridley Scott’s Alien, particularly to the fusion of organic and technological forms, and said that his own work kept exploring the intersection between the man-made and the natural. When asked to describe it succinctly, he called it an exploration of the “internal and external cosmos”, concerned with solitude, mystery and encounters between familiar and strange things. A few years earlier he had spoken even more directly about the difference between technical polish and feeling. Contemporary work could impress him technically while leaving him emotionally distant. For McPharlin, “mood and atmosphere always trump technical verisimilitude.” That sentence may be the most useful key to the pictures. He was not an illustrator interested primarily in proving that he could render a machine. His machines establish mood. His planets establish mood. His enormous rocks, impossible plants, lonely pilots, rectangular structures, fragments of architecture and strange lights establish mood. Technical plausibility serves the feeling rather than governing it. The result is why reproducing the ingredients does not reproduce McPharlin. A contemporary image generator can be asked for a weathered spaceship, a lone astronaut, orange vegetation, 1970s science-fiction illustration, analogue controls and a misty alien valley. The output might contain every noun in that description while missing the reason the picture exists. McPharlin’s strength lies in selection. What is absent matters. He understood when an environment needed one figure rather than twenty, when a vehicle needed to disappear partly into fog, when a horizon should be obscured, when the largest object in the frame should refuse to explain itself. The silence in his paintings is designed. One can see the painter making decisions about where comprehension should stop.
There is a lineage behind this that predates cassette futurism as a phrase and even predates the technological era with which cassette futurism is associated. Science fiction has always been partly a history of designers attempting to make the unseen credible through surfaces. Forbidden Planet in 1956 remains one of the great early demonstrations of an entire otherworldly civilisation being suggested through production design. The film’s story loosely reworks Shakespeare’s The Tempest, yet its immense reputation within visual science fiction also belongs to its environments, electronic sound, alien machinery and Robby the Robot, a piece of future technology so memorable that the BFI describes him as one of the defining icons of 1950s science fiction. Forbidden Planet comes from a different design era than McPharlin and from a more polished studio tradition, but it contributes something enduring to the ancestry: the planet as psychic space, the alien mechanism as archaeological evidence, the technological sublime as a form of mystery. Then the visual grammar shifts. 2001: A Space Odyssey turns spacecraft into environments of industrial precision. Alien takes the machinery down another path, dirtying and crowding the future until the Nostromo feels inhabited by workers rather than displayed in a showroom. McPharlin explicitly returned to Alien, and contemporary accounts of cassette futurism understandably treat the film’s consoles, CRTs, physical switches and industrial equipment as one of the foundational sources for the later label. Yet McPharlin’s other line of descent matters just as much. It runs through illustrated science fiction, European surrealism and the peculiar flowering of French fantastic art around the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet of 1973, designed with Roland Topor, remains extraordinary because its alien world does not try to normalise itself for the viewer. Criterion has described its landscapes and creatures as part of a singular, politically charged, surreal science-fiction vision, realised through Topor’s designs and cutout animation. Laloux later made Les Maîtres du temps, released in 1982 and commonly known in English as Time Masters. This time the visual design came from Jean Giraud, Moebius. The BFI describes it as Laloux’s second feature and identifies Moebius’s designs as central to its hallucinatory science-fiction imagery. McPharlin himself explicitly placed Warp Riders somewhere between Dune, Isaac Asimov and the films of René Laloux. That is not a critic constructing a lineage after the fact. That is the artist telling us where his imagination had been travelling.
Moebius is particularly useful here because his work demonstrates the power of science-fiction illustration to move between media without surrendering its strangeness. His drawings could belong to comics and still seem to contain films, architecture, costumes and entire ecologies waiting inside them. His contribution to cinema went through projects including Time Masters, and his wider influence reached productions such as Alien, Tron and The Fifth Element. The BFI describes that influence directly when discussing Time Masters. What I mean when I think of McPharlin as, in some personal sense, a living Moebius figure is therefore not that the two artists draw identically. They do not. Moebius has a linear clarity, graphic elasticity and capacity for comic storytelling that belong entirely to him. McPharlin is frequently more painterly, grainier, denser in atmosphere, closer at times to paperback airbrush, record-sleeve surrealism and the material residue of reproduction. The comparison is about position. Both can make a single image imply an ecosystem. Both understand that science fiction grows richer when technology and landscape are designed together rather than treated as separate departments. Both are capable of an image that seems to describe a story nobody has written yet. A Moebius desert does not look like a generic desert with a science-fiction object dropped into it. The geology, costume, vehicle, colour and emptiness appear to have evolved inside the same dream. McPharlin repeatedly achieves something related. His strange worlds do not feel decorated. The figure, machinery, flora and weather have entered into an agreement about what kind of reality they occupy.
Land of the Sleeping Things is one of the purest examples. The composition is deceptive because very little is happening in narrative terms. A figure moves through water in a yellow-orange suit, surrounded by mounds of red vegetation. Behind that figure rises an enormous vertical object whose material identity is difficult to settle. It could be geology, an organism, an eroded monument, a fossil or some combination of all four. A huge dark branch enters the foreground and cuts across the upper portion of the picture, changing the scene from an open landscape into something framed and enclosed. Tiny spherical forms sit among the growth. The sky has almost disappeared into white atmosphere. McPharlin does not answer the questions introduced by his objects. He lets texture do the work that exposition would ordinarily perform. The branch is recognisable enough to orient us, yet its scale destabilises the recognition. The red plants are recognisable enough to imply vegetation, yet their repetition turns them into terrain. The traveller’s clothing suggests purpose and equipment, yet we do not know whether this person is an explorer, scientist, survivor or somebody returning home. This is where wistfulness enters McPharlin’s work. Wistfulness is difficult to paint because sentimentality announces itself too easily. His pictures usually withhold the information that would tell us what emotion to feel. The loneliness arises through proportion. The human being is present but visually subordinate. The mist closes distance rather than opening it. The colours can be beautiful without becoming reassuring. The old illustration textures introduce an unconscious temporal distance, making the scene resemble something we have rediscovered in a forgotten book even when we are seeing it for the first time. McPharlin’s futures seem remembered because his formal language comes from forms of reproduction that have themselves aged: printed science-fiction covers, record sleeves, analogue photographs, hand-painted concept art, airbrush, grain and the softened boundaries of images that once travelled through ink and paper. The sensation is strangely double. We look ahead into an imagined future and backward into the history of imagining futures at the same time.
That same double direction defines his work for The Sword’s Warp Riders. The album, released in 2010, was conceived as a psychedelic space opera concerned with death and rebirth, and contemporary publicity explicitly described McPharlin’s cover as an homage to classic science-fiction book illustration. McPharlin himself described the project as an elaborate gatefold connected to Dune, Asimov and Laloux. The picture demonstrates how naturally he could take his private visual language into commissioned narrative work. A red planet or moon dominates space; a small vessel crosses a field that feels enormous; geometry and atmosphere share the frame. It has the quality of a paperback cover from an invented publishing history. One can imagine discovering the novel for which it was supposedly painted. His work for Prefuse 73’s Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian in 2009 pushed into a more abstract technological territory. Warp Records released the album, and surviving credits identify McPharlin for artwork and design. Even the word “Ampexian”, with its echo of Ampex recording machinery and magnetic tape culture, seems almost absurdly appropriate to his world. Elsewhere, his work for Pretty Lights returned to spacecraft, physical equipment, remote landscapes and technologies that look used rather than conceptually frictionless. His 2014 illustrations for Wired Italia show that the language could be adapted to contemporary editorial commissions. Across these projects, one sees a designer who could move from album packaging to speculative illustration to actual hand-built objects without changing the central imaginative problem. How can a machine acquire atmosphere? How can a landscape feel technologically haunted? How can a future retain traces of the past that imagined it?
Those questions have become unusually current because Intergalactic is now approaching. Naughty Dog first announced the project in December 2024, stating that it had been in development since 2020. Jordan A. Mun’s spacecraft, clothing and personal technology immediately established that this would not be a neutral or generic far future. The announcement trailer included conspicuous surviving brands and technologies, among them a Porsche spacecraft, Adidas footwear and a Sony music player, while Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin” played into a story that Druckmann later described as deeply concerned with faith and religion. In conversation with Alex Garland in 2025, Druckmann explained that the game takes place roughly two thousand years in the future on an alternate historical path branching from the late 1980s, and that Naughty Dog had developed a long internal history for the religion at the centre of its world. Reporting on that conversation also described the intended experience as one of loneliness and exploration. Those details make the visible technology more interesting than an exercise in nostalgic prop placement. If our own consumer and industrial design history diverged decades ago and continued for two millennia along another track, the old categories of past and future collapse. A compact disc player can coexist with interstellar travel because the fictional culture did not experience technological fashion in the order we did. A Porsche can become a starship manufacturer. A piece of 1980s design language can survive into a civilisation unimaginably more distant from 1986 than we are from ancient Rome. This is cassette futurism amplified to an almost geological scale. The hardware carries cultural fossils.
There is something almost inevitable about a major videogame arriving at this aesthetic now. For years, cassette futurism circulated as a design pleasure among filmmakers, production designers, illustrators, games, collectors and online communities, sometimes under that name and sometimes simply as “retro sci-fi,” “analogue future,” “used future” or the visual legacy of Alien and Blade Runner. It has become increasingly legible as its own field because contemporary technology has moved so far away from it. The flatter and more sealed our real devices become, the stranger an imagined future full of switches and removable media begins to feel. The rise of digital interfaces has given analogue imagery new dramatic power. A switch tells us someone has agency over a system. A cassette suggests information has a location. A physical archive can be lost, stolen, damaged or discovered. A CRT glows in a room. A reel of tape moves while the information moves. In narrative terms, these objects are gifts. They give invisible processes bodies. Intergalactic appears poised to take that sensibility and place it inside the extraordinary production resources of a Naughty Dog game. As of September 28, 2026, the studio has explicitly asked for patience, saying it will remain quiet through the rest of the year and “fully reveal” the game in 2027. There is no announced 2027 release date in that statement, and it would be wrong to turn a reveal window into one. What we can say is that next year a very large audience will finally be shown far more of a science-fiction world whose existing fragments already place tactile old technology, isolation and alien environment at the centre of its identity.
This is why Land of the Sleeping Things struck me so forcefully beside Naughty Dog’s new image. Again, I am not asserting that anybody at Naughty Dog saw McPharlin’s painting. Shared composition can emerge independently, particularly when two works inherit older visual languages. What matters is the degree to which both pictures demonstrate the durability of a particular science-fiction arrangement. A lone figure stands with the back substantially toward us. We enter the environment through that body, measuring our own size against it. The landscape is dominated by organic structures so large that they function architecturally. Red becomes the active colour inside a field of more muted or cooler tones. A strong branch or trunk cuts through the upper space. Depth is created through atmospheric layers and openings rather than through crowds of detailed objects. The figure is visually equipped but emotionally exposed. Neither image gives us a city, an army, a welcoming settlement or a recognisable social order. The landscape owns the frame. This arrangement goes back through science-fiction illustration, surrealism, the sublime landscape tradition and countless stories of planetary exploration. Yet the particular recurrence is still beautiful. Looking at the pictures together feels like watching one visual sentence spoken sixteen or eighteen years apart with a changed vocabulary.
The relationship becomes even more interesting alongside No Man’s Sky. Hello Games has been unusually open about the visual history behind its universe. Sean Murray described wanting the game to evoke the vivid science-fiction book covers he grew up with rather than the grey dystopian look prevalent elsewhere, and he spoke specifically about emotions such as loneliness, vulnerability and alien strangeness that he felt games used less often. Other accounts of the game’s development identify Chris Foss, John Harris, Moebius and Ralph McQuarrie among the visual reference points considered by the team. Murray has described the archetypal old cover in almost McPharlin-like terms: the desolate landscape, lone explorer, crashed ship, distant planet and strange flora. None of this demonstrates a direct line from McPharlin to No Man’s Sky, and there is no need to invent one. The more interesting point is that McPharlin and Hello Games drew water from some of the same wells. Chris Foss appears in both histories. Moebius occupies the wider background. Paperback science fiction, speculative illustration and the emotional power of unexplained landscapes bind them. The resemblance of sensibility shows how individual an artist can remain while working within a lineage. McPharlin’s red environments do not become No Man’s Sky simply because both use saturated alien colour. His peculiar melancholy, compositional restraint and surface treatment remain his own. At the same time, No Man’s Sky demonstrated that a visual tradition associated with old paperbacks could sustain an enormous interactive universe and reach millions of people. Intergalactic may become another major expression of that continuing return.
For an Australian looking at McPharlin’s work, there is also pride mixed with frustration. Australia has produced major visual artists, production designers, filmmakers, game developers, musicians and illustrators, yet geography can still influence whose work enters the popular historical story of an international movement. McPharlin was born in Adelaide, worked from Adelaide, produced art for American bands and international magazines, collaborated with labels including Warp, exhibited his analogue miniatures and built a visual identity recognisable to people around the world. His work travelled farther than he did publicly. There is something very Australian to me in that, although I admit that this is my own emotional reading rather than a biographical claim about him. The images are enormous while the artist behind them seems to have valued a comparatively quiet creative life. In his 2010 interview he had already spoken of deliberately slowing down because deadlines were preventing ideas from breathing. In 2014 he reflected that he once thought success required becoming a cog in a larger machine, a belief he had come to reject. Seen now, those remarks complicate any easy story about disappearance. Perhaps the public interprets silence too readily as absence. An artist may simply decide that public continuity is not the same thing as creative continuity.
The factual record becomes thin after 2015, and it is worth keeping the language exact. In 2018, Sci-Fi-O-Rama, which had featured McPharlin repeatedly and had interviewed him in 2010, wrote that his internet presence had stopped in 2015. The site’s editor said he had lost touch with McPharlin and had subsequently received enquiries from people seeking to commission him. He explicitly cautioned against assuming anything ominous and suggested that McPharlin may simply have been living away from public internet activity. That remains the appropriate boundary. Dan McPharlin is not, on the evidence available to me, a “missing person.” Distant Star: Finding Dan McPharlin uses “finding” in another sense. At the beginning of this project I naturally imagined the documentary containing the story of trying to locate the artist, speak with him if he wished to speak and perhaps understand why such a distinctive body of work had apparently gone quiet. Time changes projects. The title has gradually acquired a second meaning. Finding Dan can mean finding the work, finding its place in a history that is currently becoming newly visible, finding the lines that connect it to other traditions, finding what his pictures meant to people who encountered them, and finding a way to preserve the memory of an artist without converting his privacy into a problem to be solved.
That distinction matters more to me now than it did when I first imagined the documentary. The internet has changed, and so have I. Public presence once seemed almost automatically desirable. The logic of the contemporary network encourages a person to remain searchable, current, visible, reactive and continuously available. An artist who ceases posting is described as having disappeared because the platform confuses silence with nonexistence. I no longer accept that assumption. In my own life I have stepped substantially away from public online spaces. My official site, built through Blogger, has become essentially my only deliberate public-facing connection to that wider world. There is something fitting about that arrangement. Blogger itself dates to 1999, a surviving piece of the earlier web, from an era when a personal site could simply sit somewhere and wait to be visited. It does not have to become the centre of a performance. It can exist quietly. Becoming a father has also changed my relationship with time, privacy and what deserves to be pursued merely because it can be pursued. My family commitments mean Distant Star will almost certainly take longer than I initially imagined. That no longer troubles me. I still intend, for my own satisfaction if nothing else, to put the film out in some form through Psionian Films. Written excerpts may appear here while the larger project develops. The documentary simply will not turn McPharlin’s privacy into suspense. There will be no attempt to expose a private life, arrive somewhere uninvited, identify an address, force contact, or make a spectacle of somebody choosing distance. If Dan wishes to remain beyond that boundary, the boundary is part of the story.
That change has made the project more interesting to me. A film called Finding Dan McPharlin can ask why the culture thinks an artist has to remain visible for the work to remain alive. It can ask why an image sometimes grows more contemporary after its maker has stopped participating in the conversation around it. It can examine how aesthetic lineages survive without central organisation. Chris Foss paints ships for paperbacks; René Laloux and Roland Topor build a strange animated planet; Moebius designs impossible travellers and later an entire visual world for Time Masters; Ridley Scott and his collaborators make industrial space technology tactile in Alien; illustrators and record designers absorb those languages; McPharlin encounters them through books, films, music, computers and synthesizers; he constructs tiny imaginary tape machines from cardboard and paints travellers under alien skies; a later generation makes No Man’s Sky out of the colours and emotions of old science-fiction covers; online communities eventually give one portion of the accumulated visual language a name, cassette futurism; Naughty Dog develops an alternate future in which late twentieth-century technological culture somehow continues thousands of years outward; a new image appears in 2026 of another solitary human standing beneath enormous alien organic forms. Nobody needs to have copied anybody for that chain to matter. Culture is often more interesting than a simple line of influence. Images persist as possibilities.
This is also why I hesitate to call cassette futurism merely an aesthetic trend. Its current popularity arrives during a period in which the actual relationship between people, machines and creative work is changing quickly. Generative systems can now produce visual surfaces associated with historical movements or individual artists with extraordinary speed. That makes the question of authorship feel more present to me, not less. A style has never been only an inventory of visible features. McPharlin did not become McPharlin because an image contained rust-red vegetation, analogue electronics, geometric forms, distant planets and a grainy surface. Those elements entered his work through his childhood books, his musical practice, his affection for synthesizers, his memories of computers, his encounters with film, his hand-built models, his sense of colour, his willingness to leave parts of a picture unexplained and the thousands of decisions made while turning all of that history into an image. The artist is the continuity between the works. That continuity deserves acknowledgement precisely when tools make the external characteristics of art easier to reproduce.
For that reason, I would love the renewed interest in cassette futurism to bring renewed attention to the people who helped preserve and extend its visual language during periods when it was much less fashionable. McPharlin belongs in that conversation. I use the word “pillar” personally, because no official canon exists and because he did not, as far as I can verify, publicly announce himself as a cassette-futurist artist. The label is useful retrospectively. His Analogue Miniatures alone make the connection unusually strong. Fictional synthesizers and tape equipment, designed as though a parallel history of electronic instruments had produced them, are about as direct a manifestation of the idea as one could devise. His illustrations expand that material vocabulary into landscapes and spacecraft. Yet his contribution goes beyond the machinery. Cassette futurism at its best carries melancholy. It imagines a future whose objects have weight because our memories of their ancestors have weight. McPharlin seems to understand that instinctively.
Look again at Land of the Sleeping Things. Its achievement has little to do with predicting what a 2026 videogame might look like. Prediction is the least interesting measure of science-fiction art. The painting succeeds because its world feels both new and strangely remembered. The explorer has already travelled some distance before we see them. The vegetation has existed without an audience. The branch has grown for a span of time we cannot estimate. The great object in the haze does not pose for us. Nothing in the scene appears to know that it is being observed. That indifference gives the image dignity. The artist has built a place rather than an advertisement for a place.
There is an old temptation in science fiction to mistake greater detail for greater conviction. McPharlin resists it. Some parts of his images are precise and some are almost swallowed by atmosphere. The hierarchy creates memory. Human recollection does not preserve everything at equal resolution. We remember the yellow suit, the field of red, the pale sky, the dark branch, the strange body in the distance. The rest becomes emotional weather. Moebius could achieve an equivalent economy by entirely different means, sometimes with a clean line and immense open space. Topor could create it through grotesque organic forms. Foss could do it through enormous colour-blocked spacecraft whose scale overwhelms the frame. Roger Dean could turn geology into impossible architecture. Syd Mead could make industrial design imply an entire economic system. McPharlin’s particular gift is to allow those histories to settle into an image without turning the picture into quotation.
That may be why I keep returning to the word wistful. Wistfulness suggests desire directed toward something partly unreachable. McPharlin’s worlds contain that distance spatially and temporally. We want to walk into them, but they often seem like worlds already disappearing into mist. We want to know the history of the machines, but the labels cannot quite be read. We want to understand the civilisation, but only its objects remain. The future has become archaeological before we arrive.
This is the continuity I hope audiences recognise when Intergalactic opens itself more fully in 2027. Naughty Dog will make its own work, with its own artists, designers, writers, performers, engineers and history. Whatever visual correspondences emerge should be credited to the people who actually made them. My hope is simply that the cultural moment becomes large enough to cast light backward as well as forward. If millions of players find themselves attracted to a universe of old displays, physical media, immense alien landscapes and lonely travellers, perhaps some of them will become curious about the decades of art that made those pleasures possible. They may find Foss, Mead, Dean, Laloux, Topor and Moebius. They may find those old science-fiction covers. They may find the Terran Trade Authority. They may find Dan McPharlin.
And perhaps “finding” him there will be enough.
The title Distant Star originally carried an investigative hope. Somewhere beyond the visible network was an artist whose work had meant something to me, and perhaps a documentary could send a signal far enough to receive one back. I still hope, gently, that Dan one day becomes aware that people remember the work and value it. I hope he knows that an Australian artist working from Adelaide created images that travelled around the world and remained alive long after his public presence became quiet. I hope that if an opportunity such as a commission connected with a project like Intergalactic ever reached him, it would reach him as an invitation rather than a demand. He could answer or not answer. That choice matters.
For now, the documentary can remain what its name has gradually become: a signal rather than a searchlight.
The star does not have to come closer for us to know it is there.
