Ian Truelove is a UK based artist who uses digital technologies to explore new ways to make paintings. In this VR artwork, Truelove tests out what happens when one of his paintings is scaled up to an area that spans several square kilometres.
Although the land-like forms in this artwork are very similar to digital landscapes generated by algorithms, each valley and hill in this world is determined by a human gesture rather than a mathematical formula - everything in this world is hand-painted. The pixels of the original digital painting are clearly visible in the sharp-edged, mosaic-like texturing of the artwork, which forms the impossibly thin digital skin of the landscape. Each pixel is mapped to a corresponding polygon whose height is determined by the intensity of the original painted pixel. The specificity of digital media – the inherent qualities of pixels and polygons – is accentuated in a deliberate rejection of mimesis. Here, the reality of the virtual is not...
