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Although having all necessary means at disposal to create photorealistic sceneries, the artists deliberately opted for a point cloud instead which, as Luque describes it, ‘is not cinema, not photography, not even reality’. Digitalisation is not just the plain creation of a simple image. It reaches further: it allows the creation of a mouldable reality thanks to a 3D model that establishes a brand new way of perception. With these images viewers experience a real, tangible place revealing itself at the same time as a succession of geometrical coordinates, a complex of points in a simulated setting. At the same time, the precision of the generated model gives way to an unprecedented level of complexity in the concept of archive and memory. Indeed Pierre Nora warns that our society suffers from a hypertrophy of memory caused by the necessity of filing it all without a prior reflection on what is truly worth it (Farr, 2012: 63). Digital media make filing extremely easy and generate in the process vast amounts of data which, exactly as the selected locations in Ribadesella and Llanes, can be reconstructed and manipulated. Memory will not rely on old, yellowing pictures anymore. It will be instead increasingly constructed on meticulous reproductions of actual places in form of 3D models which will be nonetheless hollow, deceptive. In Nora’s view our memory is already, ‘intensely retinal, powerfully televisual’ (Farr, 2012: 66) as it is
based on photography and video. The landscapes Luque and Bilbao generated indicate another kind of memory altogether that relies on precise models of reality captured at a given time, of places which can be visited, explored and altered on. Memory becomes much more precise, though unreal at the same time. It turns into a systematic capture of all details and reminds of the condition of Ireneo Funes, Jose Luis Borges’ fictional character: he could remember each and every detail of anything he had perceived, ‘not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he perceived or imagined it’ (Borges, 1971: 125). The crammed memory of Funes finds its equivalent in the capacity of the 3D scanner to capture all details of a chaotic or extremely complex space as the woods and the rocky shores of the Bay of Biscay. It is a memory that stretches much further than the human one, able to even substitute its own experience of a place: while vivid memory is far more complete or sharp than what can be captured on a picture or video, a 3D model allows us to know what was actually there, even if we did not see it first hand. As mentioned before, though incredibly precise, the generated model always lacks a fragment: the scanner leaves a circular void on the ground where it stood. There are no data on this void because the scanner cannot capture itself. As it happens in our memory, vivid experiences are taken in from a
personal perspective and do not include our own image: the presence of the observer leaves a void in the capture of what has been experienced. This absence is highlighted by the artists in the 3D models reproducing the locations of their childhood by keeping the void caused by the hardware of the scanner itself. This dark circle, that could be easily mistaken for a hole, interrupts the precise contours of the rendered land in each scenery and acquires in this way an aura of mystery thanks to its abrupt suspension of the illusion of reality as well as thanks to the light it spreads. It is simply impossible to ignore it. Its presence-absence is so enigmatic as the monolith in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) or the dodecahedron in Félix Luque’s ‘Chapter I : The Discovery’. It reminds us that what we are observing is nothing but an artialised space. ‘I have nothing to say about landscapes. Landscape does not exist, it is just an illusion’ (Perec, 1974). The French author Georges Perec jokes about a concept Alain Roger already wrote about in his ‘Court traité du paysage’: ‘A landscape [.../...] is never natural, but always cultural’ (Roger, 1994). As suggested by the French philosopher, a location is turned into a landscape by means of a process of artialisation, namely the transformation – either by direct intervention or simply by way of looking – of nature in a place of aesthetic contemplation (Roger, 1994). To somebody living in it, the