Synthetic Landscapes

In the field of visual arts, painted landscapes have always offered the opportunity for artists to prove their ability to faithfully portray natural scenes and vistas. In addition to that, this specific natural subject has often represented the manifestation of the level of cultural and technical knowledge of a society in its various historical moments. Since contemporary digital technologies are now offering the possibility to directly derive spatial and matter characteristics of 3D objects and to interact with matter in digital environments, faithful depictions of Nature have become once again instrumental for investigations in representational tools. These kind of contemporary landscapes assume realism, familiarity, narrative, involvement of the audience as crucial ingredients, and re-open the debate about a new level of photorealism. This paper collects the results of a three years research undertaken with the purpose of exploring how digital depictions obtained from high-definition reality-based acquisitions can contribute to widen the iconic visual repertoire of Nature and can be used as source of inspiration within the design process