‘Mirage’ was conceived as a film about Milton Keynes, but from the outset avoided categorisation — neither documentary nor conventional narrative, but an attempt to articulate the spatial and psychological experience of the city through a lens of technological distortion. It borrowed heavily from the cinematic language of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979); like Tarkovsky’s Zone, Milton Keynes presented itself as an environment structured by rational planning yet permeated by estrangement. At its core, Mirage explored the tensions between a city’s utopian aspirations and the ways those aspirations decay, fragment and reassemble over time — its grid, roundabouts and green corridors forming a skeletal memory of a planned future that never fully arrived. The film rendered this duality through photogrammetry, a method of spatial reconstruction that captures the visible but inadvertently reveals the invisible: organic forms are captured with uncanny fidelity while man-made structures appear incomplete, warped or unstable. Mirage embraced these failures — buildings collapsing into abstracted forms, roads stretching unnaturally, roundabouts flickering in and out of coherence — as metaphors for how we process space and memory. Its Milton Keynes was neither wholly real nor wholly imagined: an in-between, dream-image of the city suspended between its planned past and uncertain future.