Landscape, 7 Untitled Black & White digital prints, variable size, 2008.
Séverine Gorlier & Gabriel Hernandez are good friends of mine from college. They take care of a small DIY book house called JETSEDITION publishing books, fanzines, etc. I've already participated in PACK A7, a project where artists were asked to create a 16-paged book by folding only a single sheet of paper.
Recently, they mentioned that they wanted to publish a collective book gathering together works evolving around the idea of landscape. I thought this was an interesting project and I wanted to participate in.
The definition of landscape given by the Free Dictionary is as follows:
1. An expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view.
2. A picture depicting an expanse of scenery.
3. The branch of art dealing with the representation of natural scenery.
4. The aspect of the land characteristic of a particular region.
5. Grounds that have been landscaped.
6. An extensive mental view; an interior prospect.
Landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe since the early fifteenth century. As you know, these paintings depict scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition.
In my opinion, this sounds like a fictional space - a window to the outside world. Depending on days, I know I might easily spend more time online enjoying the latest productions in the clouds rather than offline feeling the soft breeze over my skin. I feel silly writing this, but I probably have more memories of nature from images I've seen on a computer screen rather than from various experiences in real life. How to represent a landscape when someone is in such a situation? I wanted to express my point of view on this matter throughout this work.
The starting point for this project consisted of performing a landscape query over Flickr and downloading the first 100 "most interesting" results published under a Creative Commons license. For those who don't know, Flickr has a top-secret ranking algorithm nicknamed interestingness. It ranks the pictures by taking in consideration variables such as the number of views, the number of comments, the tags, favorites (a.k.a. Flickr bookmarking) and the time varying behavior of these factors. After downloading these pictures, I created 10 sets of 10 pictures. I combined each picture of a set together by using a function called merge to HDR in Adobe's Photoshop. Unlike what one might expect, I didn't want to use this function to maximize the visual information of a single landscape. I wanted to experiment with it and potentially minimize the information contained within each set. At last, I converted the results to bitmap to emphasize the lost of data.
These are my own personal landscapes: a selection of 7 wide-raging pictures holding extensive mental and visual sceneries. I don't know if these works will ever be published, but I wanted to share them anyway.
Please click on the images if you wish to see them in higher resolution.
Séverine Gorlier & Gabriel Hernandez are good friends of mine from college. They take care of a small DIY book house called JETSEDITION publishing books, fanzines, etc. I've already participated in PACK A7, a project where artists were asked to create a 16-paged book by folding only a single sheet of paper.
Recently, they mentioned that they wanted to publish a collective book gathering together works evolving around the idea of landscape. I thought this was an interesting project and I wanted to participate in.
The definition of landscape given by the Free Dictionary is as follows:
1. An expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view.
2. A picture depicting an expanse of scenery.
3. The branch of art dealing with the representation of natural scenery.
4. The aspect of the land characteristic of a particular region.
5. Grounds that have been landscaped.
6. An extensive mental view; an interior prospect.
Landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe since the early fifteenth century. As you know, these paintings depict scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition.
In my opinion, this sounds like a fictional space - a window to the outside world. Depending on days, I know I might easily spend more time online enjoying the latest productions in the clouds rather than offline feeling the soft breeze over my skin. I feel silly writing this, but I probably have more memories of nature from images I've seen on a computer screen rather than from various experiences in real life. How to represent a landscape when someone is in such a situation? I wanted to express my point of view on this matter throughout this work.
The starting point for this project consisted of performing a landscape query over Flickr and downloading the first 100 "most interesting" results published under a Creative Commons license. For those who don't know, Flickr has a top-secret ranking algorithm nicknamed interestingness. It ranks the pictures by taking in consideration variables such as the number of views, the number of comments, the tags, favorites (a.k.a. Flickr bookmarking) and the time varying behavior of these factors. After downloading these pictures, I created 10 sets of 10 pictures. I combined each picture of a set together by using a function called merge to HDR in Adobe's Photoshop. Unlike what one might expect, I didn't want to use this function to maximize the visual information of a single landscape. I wanted to experiment with it and potentially minimize the information contained within each set. At last, I converted the results to bitmap to emphasize the lost of data.
These are my own personal landscapes: a selection of 7 wide-raging pictures holding extensive mental and visual sceneries. I don't know if these works will ever be published, but I wanted to share them anyway.
Please click on the images if you wish to see them in higher resolution.
