Jan Robert LeegteMountains 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.

Jan Robert Leegte

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