For over 15 years, an important part of my artistic practice arises in the digital realm: in the infinite void right behind the glass of my computer screen, where I’m navigating between the virtual x, y, and z axes of 3D software.
In this immaterial environment, I’ve imagined Distant Pasts and Far Futures in which my concern for the ecological state of this planet lingered. Until recently, I would say that escapism is my core business.
In my urban studio, my view on the city’s rooftops would be replaced with wide landscapes, simulated nature inhabited by artificial trees. The densely populated area outside, with its impossibly complicated social relations, is exchanged for uninhabited worlds. Here, humanity would be reduced to remnants.
Between 2019 and 2023 I’m working on a doctoral artistic research project, The Appeal of the Unreal, that began as an investigation of simulated nature through screen culture and habitat dioramas. But already within months of the start of this route, something happened that awoke a sense of urgency, pulling the project out of the comfort of the virtual axes and dropping it in Real Life coordinates.
Originally, the term ‘contagion’ was reserved for the spreadability of diseases. In Spillover. Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) author David Quammen explains abundantly the close relation between the rising numbers of emerging viruses and the progressing ecological disturbances by human interventions.
The research compiled here, is centered on a parallel kind of contagion: an infestation of spruce bark beetles, amplified by changing climatological circumstances.
Similar to a virus, a beetle plague is only really noticeable after its result inflates to our visibility scale. In the case of this exposition, branches started to break off, some trees fell down during storms, needles turned brown and were shed, and eventually a small forest died.
This former forest is now The Plot.
In my artistic output, non-linearity is an unlikely constant. Actions can take place simultaneously, in another sphere, or in random order, and sometimes, things fold back onto itself.
∞
Some of the works you’re presented with on this website have multiple purposes, but they all arise from a desperate need to somehow help fix things. In that process, mistakes are made. I consider these mistakes to be of artistic value. In some cases, I’m even deliberately involved in scientific quackery, which I find an equally artistic medium.