Hyperscapes

With man's detachment from nature, the meaning of landscape changed. The once threatening wilderness has become a place of longing for those seeking peace and quiet, tourists, hikers and eco-activists. Today, landscape is nature, seen from the human point of view, a place that we always perceive aesthetically and that attracts us. This development comes to a head in digital spaces. Here we design landscapes in video games or in the metaverse exactly according to our wishes and needs. Real nature provides us with an ever more remote template for this.

The exhibition «Hyperscapes – Virtual Landscape as a place of longing?» is interested in escaping into man-made hybrid and digital landscape spaces. What are we looking for? And do we find what we are looking for? Hyperscapes enables the audience to enter artificial landscape spaces themselves, to experience their effect and to adopt a reflective attitude.

The exhibition focuses on landscapes as idealized places of longing. «Hyperscapes – Virtual landscape as a place of longing?» investigates in particular the question of how this idealization of the landscape continues in digital space. Based on the observation that virtual spaces are designed as natural landscapes in digital art and game design, the exhibition aims to explore the nature of these designed landscapes.

Two tendencies can be observed: on the one hand, very mimetic, naturalistic to hyper-realistic landscapes, which tie in with traditional landscape painting and the most lifelike representation of nature from the human point of view. On the other hand, a freer design of digital landscapes that is totally left to the imagination, which gets rid of the known physical laws and ideas and allows new, speculative landscapes to emerge. Especially in the digital space, the freedoms have increased to such an extent that the landscape, completely decoupled from nature, adapts to the individual wishes of the designers.

The exhibition «Hyperscapes – Virtual Landscape as a place of longing?» would like to show the different ways in which we imagine and build the landscape in virtual space and how we move in it.

An exhibition project organized by the Kornhausforum Bern in cooperation with the Bern Design Foundation.