Imaging Nature

I wonder how many people will watch Grant Stevens’ online screen work Fawn In The Forest (2020, the third Light Source commission by Buxton Contemporary), without knowing anything of what is going on while they watch it. Its online didactic states that the work—a CGI animated fawn aleatorily roving an equally CGI modelled/rendered American forest environment as it is framed with corresponding randomness by a floating camera perspective of its movements—is “programmed with artificial intelligence (AI)”. Did you subtly nod your head while reading that, assuming that something must be happening at the intersection of AI and CA? That contemporary screen culture must somehow welcome AI into its Rooma-vacuumed sweep of current topics? The audience for this work is bound to be a select grouping who would likely defend their self-rating of visual literacy. So let’s pretend this review is a literacy test.