desert.vfx

Maxime Lefebvre & Leah Wulfman

© Space Saloon – FIELDWORKS, 2019

A film by: Maxime Lefebvre & Leah Wulfman

Workshop Participants: Brittany Arceneaux, Nattha Dhamabutra, Martin Hitch, Thongtor Nontavatit, Brad Stire

Original Cinematography: Maxime Lefebvre, Leah Wulfman, Zeno Legner & Space Saloon

Readily captured and capturable, interior and exterior worlds become part of our models and renders architecture itself. What is interior and exterior to the computer, the building, and the world now operates back and forth in incessant iteration, simulated and material.

Architectural design today could be said to be more about the processing of worlds of potential and less about designing the world anew, carte blanche on a leaf of paper, or a Rhino vacuum. The architectural threshold today is akin to a green-screen set: a traditional special effects prop used for composing and overlapping two—or twenty—images, collapsing multiple realities in the process. 

Using the green screen as a tool to stitch and cross spatial realities—worlds simulated digitally and landscapes physically present underfoot—the desert becomes remixed by using content captured from both the site itself and mined from video-game depictions of arid wilderness. Green cut-outs become prop caricatures, poking through and poking fun at their new desert surroundings. These props become an active green screen, collapsing notions of what is natural and what is artifice; they carefully calibrate and align these realities in such a way that mixed realities become productively cross referential. 

With a constant mediation of a natural landscape location with its digital histories and spatial simulations, desert.vfx emerges to play tricks and poke a satirical finger at the purist view of nature.