Clive Holden
https://cliveholden.com/
Mountains, beautiful, made of math. INTERNET MOUNTAINS is my ongoing, multi-platform project begun in 2016. So far, it's included c-prints, video loops, and NFT digital artworks. This new trio, INTERNET MOUNTAINS 50A, 50B, and 50C, is part of a set of 20 seamless loops made to evoke a sense of charged calm, of impending change and serene acceptance.
Lately, I've been interested in the innovations of the en plein air landscape painting movement in mid-19th century France –– and in re-mixing this, in a sense, with early landscape photography, where people hiked into alpine locations with heavy cameras. This was a physically strenuous activity required to capture the image of a mountain. I love the tension between those artists versus today's who are working with intangible landscapes, in a new kind of countryside. Of course there's also cinema in the innovate mix, where many people first visited virtual far-off landscapes, while in fact they were relaxing together.
These works feature rose-colored spheres floating in randomized patterns –– with an original background image used as raw material, one of the earliest colour photos in existence, found languishing in a French internet archive. Its raw physicality is visible in its ironically beautiful, marred surface.
But this work also refers to the non-physical … at first glance, today's ephemeral existence is the opposite of the real mountain in this photo ... but is it? Humanity has always lived in an inter-zone, a dynamic space between terra firma and our imaginations. This seems more exaggerated in the 21st century, but in fact it's how humans have always lived –– it defines what it means to be human.
A digital image which we perceive as mountain has in fact been dissolved into math and reconstituted into an ephemeral representation that no longer carries even the tiny mass of photographic paper.
