Ollie Ma'

Nature is compromised by technological progress. It is fragmented, deconstructed and recombined into units of value that are traded by artificial intelligences through global networks of capital. Control of the world is handed from humans to machines as markets decide which resources are accumulated with no regard for the ensuing destruction; ecosystems collapse, biodiversity is lost, mass extinctions are rife and runaway climate chaos has begun.

Replacing Nature is a body of work consisting of virtual sculptural propositions that contain fragments of Nature’s surface that were retrieved from a small area of British wilderness. The pieces abstract these units of Nature through multiple layers of representation; the compromised physical, the digital image, the photographic print, the virtual sculpture, the gallery space and the screen. The works exist in the artist’s virtual studio, which is located in an imaginary entropic-heat-death like environment that was constructed through the economy of a videogame engine.