Mark Tribe

Plein Air is a series of aerial images of virtual landscapes. Made with advanced cartography software that convincingly simulates the Earth’s surface, each piece combines multiple views of an idealized fictive world: unspoiled, edenic places that show no trace of human presence. At first glance, the photographs seem much more akin to the tradition of the sublime in landscape painting than the images of widespread ecological destruction we see today.

Yet the landscapes are simulations of actual places, generated by inputting geospatial data (such as longitude and latitude) and atmospheric information into the software. This tenuous relationship between fact and fiction calls to mind the history of photography as an indexical instrument, and the realities of digital photography as a medium that is always already open to manipulation and highly contextualized online by metadata such as tags or other embedded media. Plein Air functions as a series of data images, generated by information rather than the camera lens. The irregular polygonal contours of each work highlights its own making, referring back to the technology which requires the stitching together of multiple images taken from neighboring coordinates on the depopulated Earth.

Plein Air looks at the land from a “drone’s eye view,” a machinic perspective that is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary visual culture. In this series, Tribe implicitly critiques the ways in which aerial imaging is used to control territories and regulate geopolitical tensions. While the landscapes on view here are not straight photographs but rather computer-generated images, they are uncanny portraits of an arena where the physical and the virtual seem to converge.