What is nature's potential for regeneration in conditions of constant entropic interaction with humans? The illusory image of a green forest, which in fact hides the consequences of fires under »digital noise,« reveals the tension between the natural and the artificial, between life and death. The project emphasises individual and collective responsibility in the use of natural resources, questioning the ethics of consumerist attitudes towards landscapes.
The work is a subjective interpretation of the forest space as a place that is in constant tension between recreational utopia and potential catastrophe. Recreation becomes a metaphor for a hidden threat, where every individual act has systemic ecological consequences. Small acts of human disregard are superimposed on macro processes such as war and climate change.
For his project, Vartan Makarian repeatedly photographed burned and living forests in the Poltava region to contrast these two states. The video was created using photogrammetric methods to create spatial models from these photographs, with further processing via Gaussian Splatting, a method of rendering volumetric data without the need to convert it into surface or linear primitives. This combined approach achieves an organic combination of realistic and abstract elements.
The work was created within the Echoes of the Earth residency at ∄ in Kyiv in 2024, during which six artists selected via open call collaborated with Ukrainian researchers and ecologists to transform their field experience into multimedia artworks.
Horizons of Disappearance was produced within the framework of Echoes of the Earth, a project by Mariana Berezovska, Mila Kostiana, and alen hast that was supported by ∄ and Goethe-Institut.