Dataset
A vast majority of the landscape imagery available on the internet reproduces, often unintentionally, the outdated aesthetics of the Picturesque. This unconscious aesthetics ignores parts of the landscape touched and scarred by the human hand in an effort to capture true “nature”. However, my project critiques the aesthetic regime of the Picturesque, arguing that we cannot ignore these “unnatural” parts of the landscape.
Utilizing image-based AI tools, my project contaminates datasets of picturesque landscapes with imagery of the ecological impacts that our society has had on the landscape. While the AI attempts to understand the collection of images and their similarities, it combines the two aesthetics into an agonistic relationship where the natural and the unnatural push against each other to emerge within the image.
