The beauty in simplicity

An address on the use of point clouds and particle VFX in the digital arts.

My earliest experiments in digital art as an alternative method of expression came from point cloud and particle VFX aesthetics. From my work in game design, I always thought the objects I had scanned and implemented into a virtual environment used an interesting process and captured a shifting of what we would call matter or a tangible asset from the real to the digital. A shifting of dimensions or a change in reality.

To anyone that spends time in photogrammetry capture software, they are aware of the birthing of a digital asset from data ‘points’ from an array of reference; being a set of photos or video.
What interests me the most is this exact procedure. Creation.
I see these points as an abstraction or a foundational layer to the digital world, the games we play, the landscapes we walk on, the assets we hold. When you break it down, everything has data points, whether directly scanned or not. They can be vertex normals, vertices, all acting as foundational integrity to everything we map in digital space.

This inspired the collection ‘Future Landscapes’.
The creation of the foundational level of environments in digital worlds. Its purest and most abstract form, the 1s and 0s that the computer reads and writes. Points of integrity that provide collective structure.

In ways, it inspired a lot of my work before with my sculpture project ‘mountain_landscapes’ and short film ‘An Intangible World’. While both were not designed with the data point and foundational integrity thought in mind, they were created with mapping the digital realms in a simplistic and abstract form.
Both are incredibly important works from my years of research and development in game design, the metaverse and world analogy.

I really believe a point or a particle is truly a beautiful visual. On its own and as a collective, a point of light encapsulated by a void and with form in its structure. It depicts the notions of life/death, substance/void, yin and yang. A theme of contrast.

The shape can be manipulated, commonly though it is a circle and this in my mind is the one I speak of here, but due to the nature of a texture being squared in real-time applications, they can be stripped back to this and in the projects I work on data thought, this aesthetic fits beautifully, rather than harmonious circles creating structure they can be squared bytes and code.

An almost perfect representation of a whole and logic, something and nothing; an abstract for the digital worlds to come.