Rick Silva – Western Fronts

Rick Silva’s Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears is an experimental video that reflects the political and ecological threats that face four U.S. National Monuments. The work combines aerial drone footage and photogrammetry with 3D animation to create a nature documentary that collapses into itself. The wilderness is scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into grayscale polygons —in these redactions we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction. Visit https://westernfronts.com/Mineral_Apocalypse_Transparent_Earth.pdf to read an accompanying essay by Geoff Manaugh (https://geoffmanaugh.com/).

Silva (b. Brazil, 1977), is associate professor of art at the University of Oregon. His works envision near-future ecologies altered by technology and climate change. See more at http://ricksilva.net/.