Digital Nature

The Digital Nature (2020) video installation stems from the desire to appropriate nature by enclosing it within a contained system that both develops and conserves it. Like a greenhouse production, nature is recreated and imitated, immortalized and proposed in its moment of maximum climax, deemed as its most representative and evocative moment. Fixed in a form of sculpture, sealed in the loop circuit, it acquires an unusual dynamism and a new reality, consecrated as an object of worship, totem and origin, symbol of a whole, part of a more vital vastness.

Man is no longer a passive contemplator of every evolution of the world and its unfolding; he becomes the author, homo faber, complicit of a human, artificial creation, distorted but at the same time real, true action and creative implementation. Gathering the natural process in its congenital and essential substance, man segments and decontextualizes it into a fascinating and hypnotic detail, chosen to be presented in a temporal continuum which confers eternity. Through the video and the artificial re-presentation, Ooopstudio honors and celebrates the power of nature, breaking with its classical aesthetic conception, finding correspondence with futurist thought:

 «Forget about real flowers. Now it is time to recognize the decline of natural flora that no longer responds to our taste. […] We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable, the imperceptible. We will find abstract equivalents of all the forms and elements of the universe then we will combine them together according to the whims of our inspiration to form plastic complexes that we will set in motion.»

GIACOMO BALLA
The Futurist Flora and Plastic Equivalents of Artificial Odors, 1924 

The idyllic relationship with the landscape, belonging to nineteenth-century romantic thought, has been overcome in favour of a more urban sensibility that does not contemplate, but rather reacts, giving life to new solutions. Nature, deliberately suspended in space and time, is eternal because it is frozen and guarded, and not proposed in a flux entailing an inevitable deterioration. Only the element of water, a reflective surface that moves with a slight wave motion, gives a breath of real life, increasing the dynamism of this still life.