Orogenesis

Landscapes without memory

Joan Fontcuberta

Joan Fontcuberta presents untouched, infinite landscapes ‘never seen before by human eyes’. His vistas recall isolated Alpine regions, Nordic fjords and inaccessible gorges with idyllic waterfalls – but no one has ever climbed these mountains or wandered through these remote worlds. Fontcuberta aptly dubs them ‘landscapes without memory’, but they turn out to be surfaces onto which we project the natural world we know, whether from life or from media representations. The majority of the landscapes are shown from a distance, but upon closer inspection they seem just a little too smooth and unspoiled – and in fact they are constructed images. Fontcuberta creates his landscapes using Terragen, a computer program that can transfer the surface texture details of a picture into a new image. Originally developed for military and scientific purposes, the software is primarily used today for TV ads and to generate background landscapes for video and computer games. Orogenesis, the work’s title, refers to orogeny, the scientific term for the natural process of mountain building.