Deepfakes

I created a video game with a nordic coastal landscape. There’s a beach, sea, dunes, grass, seagulls, and dramatic weather. Players can walk and observe. Or pick a rocket launcher and shoot rockets into the sea at random while watching the sunset. Then I project this game on a big studio wall—like in a cinema. I paint the landscape in oils, with a spirit of an impressionist painter working in plein-air.

I use methods developed through the history of observation-based painting. It’s a process of painting a picture from direct observation—as opposed to constructing a picture through visuospatial intelligence and memory. Which are the two opposite modes of picture-making. With this process I transcend that opposition. I make a picture both by constructing and by observing it.

On each painting I wrote a phrase ending with the word ‘DEEPFAKE’. I use this word as a fun buzzword, rather than with its intended literal meaning. But it does reflect the fact that it is faking the process of observation-based depiction of nature. Because there’s no nature behind it. Instead I have a virtual experience of nature, a visual simulation. Behind the image lies a pure abstraction, a computer render of mathematical formulas. The video game stands in for the real—or for nature. To an observer unaware of this background process, the image might look as if painted straight from nature.

Painting is a product of culture, but also a product of nature, as much as all humans are part of nature. So even if I bypass nature as a source, I still get nature as the result. I deliver paintings into nature without having nature as a starting point.