TERRA NULLIUS
By Patxi Araujo (ES)
Imagine that you live in a near future. You’re watching a planet from a space station, or looking through a microscope. What you see is somehow alive, but you do not know exactly what it is. Terra Nullius is the ‘geological’ activity of a software entity, in the disembodied and abstract nature of a computer system. This activity creates the variables of a topographic representation of mountains, whose movement you can see and listen to. Inside an infinite scale, a minimal, uninhabitable, and impossible landscape gets created and destroyed, thanks to the fragile balance between opposite forces.
Against the backdrop of a hypothetical but possible planetary collapse, Terra Nullius speculates about the possibility of creating the memory of the organic from the digital; i.e. the exploration and recreation of the natural from a technological approach.
BIO
Patxi is an artist and researcher based in Spain with a background in fine arts. In his recent works, he explores the relationships between art, current technology and his poetics, from which he investigates scenographic applications, installations and events of an interactive and immersive nature under visual programming environments. He has made projects with techno-magic, centred around the meeting places between synesthetic aesthetics, and about the concept of the human through bodies, perceptions and metaphors from environments of programming, artificial life or simulation. His work has been recognised and selected in different biennials, festivals and contests of both video art and electronic experimentation. He combines his work as an artist with teaching as a professor at the Department of Art and Technology at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of the Basque Country.