The History of the Landscape Generator:

This project was developed for my first exhibition on my MA in 2017. It has continued to be subsequently developed. In the summary here you are seeing the project as it was in 2017. I am intending to update these webpages over the autumn of 2022 to show a more completed version of this project:

It was not the first project that came to mind when starting my postgraduate work, but rather born out of a response to some of the problems evident in modern photography (I have put a bit more information on this within my blog) and it has proven the most popular of my ideas with my current tutorial group. It is not my plan to explain everything about the project on the website, but I hope that I can give you at least an idea of all of the main elements that make up the work.

The work is centred around the idea of the Victorian peep show, which to contradict a modern view of a sexually orientated spectacle, usually was a box into which a viewer looked often with a magnifying glass to see a manipulated perspective of a scene, often an interior of a room, theatre, objects, pictures or figures. This would be presented as part of a travelling show by a showman who would often give a dialogue to explain the scene.

A peep show device as illustrated by Theodor Hosemann in 1835.

Building Model Landscapes:

My idea was to present a model landscape of my own construction with the idea of photographing it as though it were a real landscape. This was based around the academic theory that due to modern digital photography we are rapidly running out of landscapes that have not been photographed; so that in a sense all landscapes are now slightly derivative, influenced by, taken at a different angle or just plain copies of earlier landscape photographs.

I thought to myself what it would be to be able to leave Earth and photograph other worlds to be the first human photographer to visit Mars or Mercury or the moons of Jupiter. It struck me, that the information was almost certainly available (though space probes, satellites and telescopes) to make virtual copies of these landscapes, however, rather than making a computer-generated model I thought that it would be interesting to make my own version of a ‘peep show’ in which the landscape is contained inside a box and then to photograph that. I liked this idea because of how it plays with the notion of ‘virtual reality’ and ‘digital and analogue’ realities: e.g. I am taking digital information from space probes and then converting it into analogue information (the landscape) before re-digitising it in the digital camera. In a sense this is commenting on the often-strained relationship that analogue and digital photography have.

I began the process by working out the perspective that a camera would take when looking into a peep show and then calculating the size of my box and where I would need to place everything. This design was not directly based on traditional peep shows (I had a book of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London: ‘Eyes, Lies and Illusions’ which had run back in 2004 and which told the story of many 19th century optical shows and entertainments akin to peep shows, but I did not base my work on these designs), but I rather designed around the notion of it being photographed.

For the final piece of work, I had in mind a set of photographs (of the landscapes) placed around a room with the peep show sitting surreptitiously in the centre of the room.

The design settled on a large box, more than 60 cm2, made out of wood with various slots in the side and back so that different scene panels could be slotted in and out. Like a small theatre this would allow me to change and manipulate the scenes. I decided (like many early photographic instruments) to give my box a scientifically sounding name; the ‘Belvederoscopic Generator’ – I believe belvedere comes from the Latin and later Italian for a beautiful of fair view and ‘scopic’ comes from the ancient Greek to ‘look’ or ‘see’. An early example of the boxes design is illustrated below:

An early illustration showing a plan of the Belvederoscopic Generator.

For next step I used a piece of software that already happened to own which enables me to virtually (on my computer) to travel to any reasonably sized body in our solar system, to enter a time and date (the date that I started the project) and to have to sky shown before me with all of the astronomical bodies in their correct positions. I chose for my first scene / destination the planet Uranus’s moon Umbriel and the large crater located at its north pole named Wunda (after a character from Australian Aboriginal myth). This was chosen because I had looked at this crater before and made an illustration of it as part of BA at UWE Bristol; my interests in science and astronomy in art go back more than 15 years. Wunda is an interesting crater because it is large (131 km in diameter), oddly shaped and unlike the rest of the moon appears to be bright white.

My original drawing on the Wunda crater back in the year 2000.

To create my scene took the information from my virtual astronomical map and added it to any photographs, maps, or virtual topographies of Umbriel; whilst this was not a huge amount of information, it was enough for me to start the next processes. Which was imagining myself on the surface of the moon, at different spots around Wunda and then drawing (mainly pen and ink drawings), as though sketching outside the landscape before me. I did this for a number of positions around Wunda, until I had enough of an idea of the landscape. I then used these drawings to make the model. I likened this, at the time to the scene in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ where Richard Dreyfuss’s character ‘Roy’ starts to see the landscape around ‘Devils Tower’ in Wyoming and starts making models of it. In fact, I re-watched the film and added some stills of the scenes to my sketchbook.

The first new sketch of Wunda.

One of many alternative views of the crater.

Recycled Media:

The model is primarily made out of recycled materials, partly because they are cheap but also because I liked the notion of making a landscape out of human rubbish and I wondered if it was possible to turn rubbish back into a precious item. Of course, there are already theories relating to ‘rubbish’ but I did not want to create ‘brickolage’, a collage of junk but rather a complete item that happened to made out of waste or recycled materials. I should point out that this was not the main point of the piece, though it did start me off down a particular track because not only was the landscape made out of waste material but the box too. The landscape is plastic bottles waste newspaper and card, wood off cuts, ash from the fire plus some ground down stone from the yard; the box is mainly made out of broken pallets and wood off-cuts. I would estimate that 90% of the whole thing is recycled. The difficulty being that making things out of old materials takes a lot longer than going to a hardware store and buying everything that you need.

The Project In The Future:

I found this whole process fascinating and it really did take me on a journey. For example: I may, if I continue making these landscapes end up becoming an expert in planetary geology; as you become obsessed in getting your model to at least look plausible. On a similar point I spent hours trying to create the right aggregates for my model, I found that not just any old stone will do, and not the stuff from model shop either, it has to be the right stone, broken up in the right way to the right size and that this is key to making your model look realistic. Likewise the photography also changes the nature of the work and there is much photographic manipulation that you can do (but also things you cannot do in camera).

As it stands I am nearing completing of the box itself and the first landscape and I have started working on a second landscape with more planned.

The project has actually separated itself into four parts:

THE BOX: which is a historical object; I have been looking at it and working on it as though it is somewhere between a piece of sculpture and an artefact.

THE MODEL LANDSCAPES: in which I have become increasingly obsessed in their believability.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS: this is the same as above but with an added level of manipulation that gives a changed scene.

THE MYTH: as I have created this work I found myself wondering what it would be like to visit these worlds, to be the first space artist; this has started me on a process of making a fictional narrative to the work. This is still at a concept stage but I will be interested to see where it goes.

The photographs here all show different developmental stages to the work but not a completed stage; I hope to shortly upload a more completed version of the work, and to keep on updating as the work as it progresses.