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Marching Band

BA graduation project, Royal Academy of Art The Hague · 2019 · Concept and development

Unity
NavMesh pathfinding
TerraLand
Melown VTS
Satellite and elevation data
Real-time simulation

A marching band walking through a landscape with nobody in it, on a route the software picks. My BA graduation project at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.

It came out of my thesis, Understanding Nationality, which asked whether a nation-state is a natural extension of the family or exists only in the heads of the people who belong to it. It opened on a line from Benedict Anderson:

The members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

A marching band is a literal version of that: a nation performing itself, in formations made to be read from a grandstand. Here there is no grandstand. And the flags are white, a nation parading under the sign of surrender.

The landscape is real, built from satellite images and elevation data, with every building and person taken out.

The terrain’s elevation alone, untextured: a square tile of ridges and valleys lit by a low sun against black — The terrain’s elevation, untextured.

It never exists all at once. The map streams in tiles from Melown’s map service as the band moves and is discarded behind it, so the band could walk anywhere on the planet and the land exists only around it. If a nation exists only as long as people imagine it, this one’s ground exists only where it is being performed.

Nobody choreographed the route. I set parameters, and Unity’s pathfinding avoids what is too steep and walks through what it can. Sometimes it gets stuck, and the band marches on the spot against a slope it cannot get around. I didn’t plan that, and it became the image the piece was looking for: a parade that exists to be watched, stuck in an empty corner of a country with nobody there. I made it as a German watching populism grow across Europe.

The band from high above, a small block of figures and a flag crossing a braided river in a green mountain valley — The band crossing a river valley, seen from high above.

The reference was John Gerrard’s real-time simulations of real places. The light follows the time of day at the screening, nothing is animated by hand, and the same settings never produce the same walk twice.

It was shown on two projectors running the same simulation live, one looking straight down onto the floor and one on the wall at eye height.

A single square of satellite imagery projected onto the floor of a dark room: houses, gardens and a winding road seen from above, the rest of the room black — The floor projection, 2019.

The installation in a dark room: one projection lying on the floor seen from above, a second hanging on the wall, both showing the same satellite terrain — The installation: one projection on the floor, one on the wall.

A schematic of the 2019 installation in white pixels on black. In section, one ceiling projector casts straight down onto the floor and a second throws onto the wall, with a standing visitor for scale. In plan, the floor projection lies in the room and the wall projection spans the far wall, two visitors marked as squares — The installation, schematic.

A dark room, one wall filled by a square screen showing a street-level view of the Brandenburger Tor, a woman standing before it in silhouette — A street-level view of the Brandenburger Tor, projected in the room.

A white gallery with a polished floor, a large square screen showing the white cliffs at Dover from above, a man walking past it towards the door — Stills from the 2026 concept film.

The ground was always borrowed. The map service no longer exists, so the 2019 build, started today, gets no land. The band still marches, on nothing.

Two frames side by side. 2019: the band from behind at street level, soldiers in camouflage marching through the streamed town square. 2026: the same build started again, the band as small white figures marching on black — 2019 and 2026, the same build.

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