Real Figments

COLLAGES + TEXT BY KYLE BRANCHESI + SHANE REINER-ROTH

Are you dying for a rocky waterfall to complement your swimming pool? Does your resort get too warm for skiing in the summer months? Would your dining room feel incomplete without a palm tree desert scene? Then you should thank your lucky stars you're in the thick of the anthropocene era, a glorious time when any natural phenomenon can not only be replicated for your personal pleasure but made better than the original: bigger, faster, more sublime!

The turn of the world and your location in it are irrelevant, so long as you are willing to fork up the dough. Ask yourself honestly what it is you want from nature: the landscape of your dreams—really, any landscape!—can pop up wherever your heart desires. Snowflakes can shoot out of a cannon anywhere in the world at any time and turn any incline into the ideal snowy hill. No rock formation in the world can't be recreated alongside your favourite waterslide. Thanks to tree farms, forests have never been as replenishable as they are now—and if they ever somehow run their course, there are perfectly suitable substitutions in laminates and formed stucco. And when the outdoors prove inhospitable, you can bring the party indoors, where you can have even more control over the fun! Eternal daylight is at the flip of a switch, inside or out. Nature had a good time designing our environment, but you know the old saying: “if you want a job done right, you gotta do it yourself!"

The things we scope out and make pilgrimages for in nature took millions of years to create, their processes delicate and imperceptible. What we see in them are only their outermost layer, the one that "performs" according to our human interests, and what we harvest from them is that one layer. When we replicate nature for our personal use, we design it backwards, reverse engineering it so that whatever is visible or performs for us gets top priority, while everything beneath is mere armature. We respond to the surface of things, and so the surface of things is what we simulate as the original vanishes.

Images left to right: The Forest Revisited, The Desert Revisited, The Mountain Revisited, The Sea Revisited. Digital media. Kyle Branchesi and Shane Reiner-Roth, 2015.

To see more of Kyle Branchesi's work click here, and to see more of Shane Reiner-Roth's work, click here.