Lunar Landscapes & Nasmyth Study
In 1871 James Nasmyth photographed the most scientifically accurate observations of the moon to date, but instead of photographing the moon itself he meticulously constructed plaster casts that became the true subject of his photography. His methods, due to technology not yet being capable of capturing the real subject, lead him to describe the moon’s surface in direct correlation to the human body, like skin contracting over tendons, as he believed the moon's ridges had formed.
Nasmyth’s observations manipulated a pictorial representation of space that allowed unique realities to be simulated from his studies and is a current ongoing research project.
Latent Lunar Landscapes are a combination of lunar research in an attempt to understand the generative aspects of a composited data set. Combining both photography, simulation, modelling and drawings, the dataset asks how a collective understanding of the media used to represent this landscape can draw and construct its own version of the moons surface.
