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| Natural Beauty is a video installation, combining
very realistically rendered computer generated footage of wind in 3D modelled
trees with a large scale digital photograph. The still image combines
a fully synthetic landscape of digitally generated trees and cows with
a figure drawn from low-cost advertising stock imagery. Ironically, the
woman is manipulated to the extent that she looks not only less 'real'
than the artificial nature around her, but also strangely bovine. Formally,
the image gestures more towards mannerism and early colonial portraits
of landowners and their cattle, than any contemporary 'cyber-aesthetic'.
In conceptual terms it continues my interest in the slippage between the
synthetic and the natural the occurs with biotechnology.
A sub-plot for me, is a reference to the currently fashionable notion (in computer art circles anyway) of 'artificial life'. 'Artificial Life' is a term used to describe computer generated objects or images derived from algorithmic interpretations of natural growth cycles and the like. The claims that the vaguely organic objects produced somehow not just represent but become true life, are typical of the grandiose claims of much computer art, where the artists become the gods of a new world. I am dubious of such assertions, to say the least. My artificial life is both far more artificial and far more like life. A real time meeting between a smoothed-over, cosmetic surgery enhanced, model and a bunch of computer generated cows in a field is as natural as can be expected on TV. The woman with the bovine face approaches artificiality and the 3D modelled cows approach a natural state; a deliberately unconvincing tolerance is achieved between the main characters. Patricia Piccinini 1996
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