2020

virtual reality/ installation / photogrammetry

A forest. 

A place of power. 

Pleasant place. 

Wandering through its trails becomes a walking meditation for me. While the mind is stimulated by deep sensory impulses, our physical body is experiencing the “forest bathing”. This is what constitutes a ‘real’ experience which brings a deep sense of calm and contentment only immersion in nature can provide. When we are (t)here we can look around and wonder about this world. A world that no one seemed to know anything about.

On the contrary, technology encourages people to flee from this physical world. We live in a very special time. Reality is becoming an indefinite imaginary place. Intelligent objects and machines, nanotechnologies, biotechnologies and data. We are more on- than off-line. The differences between physical and virtual are slowly disappearing. What impact does the industrial revolution have on our body and mind?

I perceive forest as an ecology that includes human beings as well as an inorganic matter. I point out the instability and ephem- erality of living and virtual matter in the 21st century. My aim is to question the perception of one’s “self” in relation to technology. We are constantly shifting the boundaries of our physical space. In this project I’m balancing on an edge between the physical and the virtual. Between the achievements of the modern society and the natural environment.

The form of the project is based on the principle of walking while collecting material from the forest and its surroundings which I later digitalised. I use real data as an input forming a 3D environment. I scan the real world from which I create a virtual copy. An imaginary landscape based on 1000s of photographs. Tiny polygons replace the organic structure. I leave the imperfections and traces of the software that automatically appear during the process as qualities worth to preserve.

I collect random, often abstract fragments of reality that i freeze in the digital world. They are like copies of the reality, sculptures in XYZ space.

We see them through the eyes of a virtual camera. Organic surface, digital reconstruction. Renaturalisation of virtual matter. Deconstruction of reality. Reduction to the simplest possible forms levitating in 3D space. Decomposition of reality. Entropy. I am exploring a walk through the 3D environment in which the relationship and boundaries between man and object, or man and his surrounding, have not yet been defined. It plays with the tension between familiarity of the subject and the alienation of the digital reconstruction.

Working with the landscape in the history of art is closely related to the discovery of photography. It is therefore quite natural that the choice of photogrammetry as an art medium automatically also led me to reevaluate the relationship between man and the environment.