alan butler

'Procedural Landscapes for Android (Yosemite National Park v1)' (2023) is a software-based generative video. It runs as an android app and uses 'functional' imagery to create a quasi-painting experience on a floor-mounted video panel.
 Chosen as a contentious site of art-historical obsession, the app uses digital elevation map data (geological survey LIDAR scans) to produce a 3D simulation of Yosemite National Park in California. As an attempt to pull apart ‘normalized’ viewing perspectives in the established language of depicting landscapes, our point of view is controlled by the random movement, rotation and focal length of a camera around the park.
 The topological height/slope data from the geological survey dictates what painterly patterns appear in what part of the landscape as the simulation proceeds through its day/night cycle.
 As such, we have moments where the camera view reveals an alien landscape of sorts, and other times when the view is are animated colour fields and closer to 20th century painting abstraction.