Pierre CasadebaigDispyr — Odysseys

In this collection of landscape representations, I used real elevation data produced by various public institutes to create digital representations of the Pyrénées mountain range. I selected pieces moving from realism to abstraction while staying in the landscape figurative style, a way to acknowledge mountains as scientific and mystic places.

I'm interested in figuring out how open-data and automation interface with a creative process, particularly how code can increase the number of realisations, while still enabling branches leading to singular pieces. In this collection, the algorithmic work enabled me to explore different geographical regions and landscape scales, but also rendering aesthetics. Because some key aesthetic elements are hard to reach by code (such as the line textures, and the diffusion of the ink on paper), I used a pen-plotter to bring the digital designs to life on paper. In this sense, because the digital files are merely the description of the machine movements, some of the physical pieces can differ greatly from the digital ones (featured pictures for Polyline Hiking, Wind Mountain, and Mountain Water).

In practice, I developed a palette of functions to transform, filter, or visualise data, and the software tools to be able to chain them in any order. Technically this approach moves away from a single algorithm but may open more playfulness when combining individual functions. Most of the presented works are short-form generative art because the search for a fit between the code workflow and the geographical features was particularly meaningful in my sense.

Pierre Casadebaig