Mountains and Drop Shadows

Mountains are grand natural statements of sculptural expression. They are birthplaces of sublime monumentality and romanticism. Their crumbs are the raw materials that provided us with a long tradition of sculpture.

In another realm there is the ambiguous materiality of the digital, the human-made bits and bytes, in constant flow through systems, from which a new order of materials emerge at the surface of the interface. Among them is the user interface phenomenon of the drop shadow. A material bereft of all our notions of materiality, it being nothing but the absence of light cast upon a surface due to an obstructing object. In the work the shadow has been severed from a non existent casting object making it less then nothing. But also the drop shadow being a digital simulacrum adds another step deeper into ethereality, making it almost a shadow of shadows. This places it in direct opposition to the most earthly rooted of them all, the mountain.

Mountains and Drop Shadows is a continuation of a line of work going back to 2013, with the net art piece https://www.mountainsanddropshadows.com in which a live script would continuously fetch images tagged ‘mountains’ from online databases. Because of this, the landscapes would become anonymised and delocalised, merely becoming an image, often ending as a humble desktop image.

For this most recent iteration of the work, querying databases felt like a thing of the past, as all those images have been added to the datasets of various image generating AI services. Mountains and Drop Shadows, 2023 uses AI generated mountain images, a mashup of all images of existing mountains, fully erasing the subjectivity of the photographer and a-localising the image.

The work is a sculptural desktop standoff between a mountain dreamt up by the internet and a drop shadow. Embodiment vertigo on the summits of the interface.

Jan Robert Leegte