For this work a real-time landscape simulator used in game development has been utilised to create a fragmented view of a storm-ridden and flood-battered landscape. Within games, generative landscapes are used instead of designed worlds, to create both the scale and the detail, but also the uniqueness of each game to be played. Minecraft had for instance a gameworld that was the size of the earth when the game was introduced – they have since made it infinite. With its unfathomable depth, this pure power within computer simulations has introduced a new habitat for the sublime. A computer generated
landscape is infinite and extremely detailed, but is created and can be destroyed at the click of a button. This extreme fragility echoes our relation with nature in the current discussions about climate change and ecological breakdown.
In the installation we are overwhelmed by the force of this simulated landscape. The storm can be heard sweeping through the trees as well as the roar of the ocean. Various screens and projections offer fragmented views of a natural scene. The setting also contains eroded Lovecraftian man-made structures, subject to large insetting waves. In 1997, Leegte’s pivotal moment in becoming an internet artist, was when he uploaded his first html file to a web-server, transforming a sketch in code into a public browser-based installation. A simple gesture of clicking the button of standard FTP software. The act happened in a time of a naive but hopeful online ideology, at the evening party of the end of a history. It is the interface of this humble uploading software which can be seen in the landscape, succumbed by simulated flooding and erosion. An interface that stood between the inside of an attic room and an ever expanding global network outside.
