Surreal Exoplanet Landscapes

One of Joan Fontcuberta's recycled landscape.

For a while now, I’ve been quite lapse on featuring some exoplanet art on this blog. Allow me to make up for it with this post featuring an unlikely source of imaginary digital realms that give a glimpse of exoplanet landscapes.

In Joan Fontcuberta’s Landscapes without Memory, the method in how these landscapes were produced is as interesting as how they were generated. Instead of inputting maps into the scenery-rendering Terragen software, Fontcuberta entered masterpieces by Paul Cezanne, Andre Derain, Gustave LeGray, Jackson Pollock, Edward Weston, and others to make 3D landscapes from the two-dimensional artworks. "The contours and tones of these painted and photographic landscapes were transformed into three-dimensional mountains, rivers, valleys, and clouds. The result gives the user the illusion of navigating in three dimensions which had previously been visualized only as a flat image".

To me, Fontcuberta’s work offers a glimpse of otherworldly landscapes, and it mirrors the unexpected surprises that exoplanets provide as we continue to discover these worlds that could prove to be more surreal than we could ever imagine.

Links:
Joan Fontcuberta’s Recycled Landscapes (From FlavorWire)
Landscapes Without Memory (Book)