Moving Image Award Winner 2021

El Salto (The Jump/ The Waterfall) - Juan Covelli (Colombia)

Artwork Description

El Salto (The Jump/ The Waterfall) 2021, Is the first iteration of a body of work titled Mirages, a project that seeks to integrate aspects of research and history of landscape, and blends them with audiovisual production using tools such as artificial intelligence, 3D capture, and modelling, as well as game development software such as Unreal Engine, with the goal of making experimental video pieces that tackle critically the policies of technology. The use of machine vision shows how it reshapes our conception of natural surroundings and landscape, given that it approaches what landscape supposes, besides recognizing an iconography, it discovers ways of thinking and understanding our surroundings framed within a specific culture and temporality. The landscape is intervened with a green chroma key, so as to compose a meta-landscape. The screen turns into a projection surface, which reminds the idea of device-screens, a device that today replaces painting and photography as the preferred site for the representation of reality. By means of neural networks, alternative landscapes are created and projected upon that surface. In this narrative fiction, the landscape is not made from an anthropocentric view but from that of the machine. Located on the outskirts of southwest Bogotá, the Salto de Tequendama waterfall was during the XIXth century, and the first part of the XXth, a national symbol that captured both the singularity of geographical reference point, as well as the romantic experience of nature and immensity.

Partners and collaborators

This project was commissioned by La galeria Santa fe of Bogotá and had support from Eyebeam NY and futura trópica project