pre-weekend reading:
https://www.growbyginkgo.com/2020/07/15/beyond-smart-rocks/

Gorgeous, impassive landscapes: http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/7993/letter-from-siberia-deserts-chara-sands-kodar-mountains-gulag-town

http://www.bldgblog.com/2017/01/the-season-of-burning-trucks/ The magical aspect of burning trucks.

(4/4) Another example, video games, range from the mundane to the fantastic and impossible: their narratives contextualized by their painted backdrops. Tonality here repeats itself, certain aesthetics becoming prominent in the ‘ebb & flow’ of fashion.

(3/4) The backdrop, or matte-painting is generally a collage unified. Containing within its whole “samples” of a larger variety of objects and locations that as a whole create a new, fictional ‘scape. Now a staple of the cinematic world, these fictional contextual backdrops are still ever present, forming and reforming what the natural, wild, domesticized and urbanized is and can be: ever (re)sampling and (re)mixing the distant.

(2/4) In those early days of 2D imagery the backdrops were static, drawn images. Insofar that they depicted a landscape there was a duality in the tonality, either the vivid greens and blues of a sunny day … flawlessly blue pixels disrupted only by the white-yellow sun or the warm hues of the sunset, a stretched out landscape bathed in orange-yellow-brown pixeled light. These very romantic, stylized vistas are the staple backgrounds from fighter-games to adventure-games.

(1/4) The act of filtering & re-enactment is in turn complemented by the act of representation. The interrelation of these two acts is made visible in many mediums and manners, however, the following example is especially clear in both how it enacts and distills the artificial landscape.

Landscape still doesn't exist.