Synthetic Nature

Machine vision, field recordings, a live image and sound system. Ongoing series since 2021, with sound since 2025.

Synthetic Nature takes ordinary footage of real places and lets software rebuild them in three dimensions. The reconstruction is never complete. Surfaces tear, edges thin out, and where the camera saw nothing, the machine fills the gap with its own guesses. I do not repair these errors. They are the subject: capture as unreliable memory rather than faithful record, a trace that reads at once as document and as hallucination.

Since 2025 the images have a sound layer made from field recordings of the same capture, and the two layers drive each other. Image and sound come from the same place. The pace is set by how a landscape comes apart, not by a beat.

The system can be played. The next step is to take it from the screen into a room: a large projection, a sound system, and a performance of evening length that moves from recognisable landscape into the breaks of the reconstruction and back. In a loop, the moment a landscape gives way has been chosen in advance. Played live, it happens in front of the audience, and it can be held, pushed further or let go.

Audio: Synthetic Nature Live v1, recording, 18 February 2026.

The screens are nine LED panels I built, 32 to 96 cm. They take live input from the same system and can be placed in a room as separate objects.