Letters From Here

For the last ten months or so, I’ve been watching from afar the development of ground forms and landscapes for a game called Sir, You Are Being Hunted, from Big Robot. Big Robot, of course, is a small game design firm founded by Jim Rossignol, who has guest-posted here on BLDGBLOG a few times over the years and who I interviewed back in 2009 about his book This Gaming Life.

What I’ve been captivated by is the so-called British Countryside Generator, a “procedural world engine” using “spatial division maths” that allowed Big Robot to generate aesthetically recognizable rural British landscapes.

“I’ve worked on a number of procedural world generation tools before,” coder Tom Betts explains on the Big Robot blog, “but this particular engine is unique in that the intention was to generate a vision of ‘British countryside,’ or an approximation thereof.”

To approach this we identified a number of features in the countryside that typify the aesthetic we wanted, and seem to be quintessential in British rural environments. Possibly the most important element is the ‘patchwork quilt’ arrangement of agricultural land, where polygonal fields are divided by drystone walls and hedgerows. These form recognizable patterns that gently rise and fall across the rolling open countryside, enclosing crops, meadows, livestock and woodlands. This patchwork of different environmental textures is something that is very stereotypically part of the British landscape. I looked for a mathematical equivalent we could use to simulate this effect and quite quickly decided upon using Voronoi diagrams.

The basic topology is thus established, one that, despite its mathematical abstraction, “looks remarkably like… the British countryside.”

(via BLDGBLOG: British Countryside Generator)

Of all the genres one might associate with contemporary artistic practice, landscape painting is low on the list, more closely aligned with the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. In this sense, Cameron Martin’s canvases, apparently photorealistic depictions of nature executed in an icy palette of pale grays and whites, are paradoxical objects, simultaneously part of an art-historical trajectory dating back to the sixteenth-century Danube School—credited as the first to make “pure landscape” the subject of paintings—and its negation. To create them, he draws on a personal archive of images, culled from advertising, found photographs, and his own staged and impromptu snapshots; selected images are then combined, altered, and manipulated in Photoshop, from which he extracts a stencil, finally applying layers of paint to canvas with an airbrush.

(via Front Page)”>Rhizome | Cameron Martin’s Nonspecific Landscapes)

Cube of Forest on the Golden Gate by Superstudio 1970–7

It’s important to note here the importance difference in the two types of locations that artists might engage: space and place. In space, artists are concerned with geography, geometry, and dimensions of distance or volume; however, in place, artists are investigating the culture, history, identity, and politics of a location. This differentiation is important since space is the only location of the two that requires (or at least asks) the artist to be physically present with the site. (Various Marina Abramovic puns can be inserted here).

With place, that physicality is not required. In fact, place does not inherently require any physical manifestation whatsoever. Place can exist in memory, in writing, in oration, or in any variable/ephemeral media. In this way, place is much more akin to Conceptual art of the 1970s, where the idea of a work takes precedence, and the execution of object-making for the purposes of containing that idea are secondary (or at least that is the hope).  If place can then exist within non-physical environments, then it is a ripe location for digital artists to inhabit and work within.

(via Hyperjunk: Site Specificity Online : Bad at Sports)

Not totally sure I follow the bit quoted above, but I do find it worth … trying to follow?

Matthew Brandt

The well-deserved hype about this young artist continues to grow as he produces work that is not only visually striking, but also pushes the boundaries of contemporary photography. Matthew Brandt’s altered photographs of lakes, which are soaked in the actual lake water, are rapidly becoming iconic. Also, his silk-screened images made with chewing gum, frosting and other edibles force the viewer to reconsider the printed image. This year in Miami both of his current galleries’ affiliates from (M+B in LA and Yossi Milo in NYC) gave him a strong showing at Pulse.

 (via Art Design in Miami: Photography)

Dan Bradica

Work from his oeuvre.

“My work involves disrupting the appearance of the natural environment to explore its relationship with artifice, control, and classification. I create photographs of temporary sculptures made from synthetic materials in managed forest preserves. Each sculptural form takes a shape complementary to its surroundings appearing in contrast to a depiction of the landscape that acknowledges the maintenance and control of civic land.

 (via Dan Bradica | i like this art)

If you want to enjoy some eye-popping infrared landscape photographs, look no further than the portfolio of French photographer David Keochkerian. He photographs gorgeous landscapes using an infrared sensitive camera, which causes the green tree leaves to show up as golden yellow and silvery white, and turning spring into fall and winter.

(via Gorgeous Infrared Landscapes With Trees of Gold and Silver)

Model train enthusiasts often photograph their miniature locomotives placed in realistic dioramas, but for his project titled “The Canadian: Ghost Train Crossing Canada,” photographer Jeff Friesen decided to use the real world as a backdrop. He photographs the train in various outdoor locations across Canada to capture its scenic journey.

 (via Photos of a Model Train Rumbling Across the Great Outdoors)

The winner of this year’s Landscape Photographer of the Year contest, photographer David Byrne, has been disqualified and stripped of his title for violating contest rules regarding digital manipulation. His winning image, titled “Lindisfarne Boats” and shown above, is a black-and-white photo showing beached fishing boats with Lindisfarne Castle in the background.

Contest founder Charlie Waite of Take a View writes in an announcement that although a certain degree of digital editing is allowed, “the extent of the changes” to Byrne’s image caused it to violate the contest’s rules. Waite does note that it doesn’t not appear that Byrne was trying to deceive the judges.

 (via Landscape Photographer of the Year 2012 Stripped of Title for Too Much ‘Shoppin)