TopoGraphy
'TopoGraphy' is a series of interactive digital artworks exploring how place, in the form of aerial views of landscapes, are pervasively surveilled, captured and analysed by diverse systems (satellite imaging, Google Earth, etc). The project uses rendered animations of aerial views, each with their own start and end latitudes and longitudes and elevation. The resolution (pixel size and frequency) and parallax view (camera angle) of the aerial renders are defined through user interaction, either using a mouse, track-pad, face tracking or other interface. Each piece employs two or more physical places, the animated views rendered in layers slightly offset in three dimensional space, such that the movement of the camera, or the point of view (Bird's Eye View), allows the layers to interact with one another through the effects of dimensional parallax and varying pixel size and frequency (dynamic pixel matrices). Due to the shifting points of view, drifting animations, dynamic parallax effects and the changing scale and frequency of the pixels in each layer, the movement of the layers leads to a moire interplay of the layers generating irridescent hybrid landscapes composed from the elements of the places rendered in the scene. Each work in the series explores two or more different places, connected by a theme, with variations in parameters for how the landscapes are rendered.
'TopoGraphy' integrates aspects of previous interactive artworks, including 'Interferography' (2025) and 'Normaleyes' (2025), that each explores aspects of visual diffraction of the surveilled subject as a form of irridescent data.
Screen recording of 'TopoGraphy 3.4'.
Olympic Dam / Chernobyl
Screen recording of 'TopoGraphy 3.0'.
Greenwich / Qingdao
0.0 52.1 @ 100m-10000m
120.316 36.099 @ 30000-1000m
Screen recording of 'TopoGraphy 1.7'.
Kharg Island / Singapore
50.322 29.212 @ 2000m
103.665 1.26 @ 2000m
Screen recording of 'TopoGraphy 1.4'.
Gaza / Tel Aviv
34.514 31.561 @ 10000m
34.952 32.093 @ 10000m
Series of still images from "TopoGraphy 1.7".
Right click to open in a new window, then click on the image when the cursor appears as a magnifying glass to enlarge it to its original 8K resolution.
Technical specification: Macbook Pro M3 Max, OSX 14.4.1, Processing 4.3 with OpenCV library, Samsung QN800D 8K display, Canon EOS R50 camera with 18-45mm lens. Note that the original 8K screen recordings that document the artworks are rendered at 4K due to the technical limitations of current screen-recording software on the Apple Mac system. There is four times as much information visible in the 8K artwork display (still images on this website are presented at full 8K resolution - Right-Click on an image to open in a new tab; select the new tab; then click on the image when the cursor appears as a magnifying glass to enlarge it to its original 8K resolution).