Boolean Nature

 

I don't totally get this, but I'm writing about it anyway because it's interesting. It's a series of 3D images by Hugo Arcier in which he has re-created a piece of nature and then subtracted a sphere.  He uses 3D imaging software to make pictures of ice and water and then deletes from them. In his words:

In logic and computer programming, a Boolean operator is a type of variable between two states. In computer-generated imagery, Boolean operations enable us to subtract, add or create an intersection between two objects.
In this series I subtract a sphere from a landscape. The latter becomes hollow. It is sterile, it lacks something, the breath of life.
It is a morbid image: a Boolean nature.

I see this piece as exploring the boundary between synthetic and natural. Or maybe the virtual and the physical? It’s interesting to me that he chose to re-create his own images of nature, rather than use “real” ones.  Perhaps it is no longer necessary to take images from nature in order for them to be real. Perhaps the point is that we can create such convincing images of life with software that we no longer need to represent it, we can just make it up.

And then he goes and makes these virtual images real, physical, by creating sculptures from his images. It makes me very confused, because the sculpture is only an image. It looks like a natural form,  marred by this perfect spherical subtraction, but it isn’t a natural form.

My favorite image is the third one, entitled Sea. The missing sphere is less obvious here than the others but for that reason even more haunting. 

I found this piece profoundly disturbing. I’m not sure what else to say about it.