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Dan Holdsworth Genesis Drop
Presented byChristina Scheublein
Continuous Topography: For almost twenty years, British photographer Dan Holdsworth has been blending art, science, and nature to produce photographs which challenge our perceptions and reinvent the notion of landscape. He has been studying many glaciers around the world, notably in Iceland, the Alps and more recently post-glacial rock formations in the Jura. The artist works together with a geologist to gather millimeter-perfect data. The latest photogrammetric and geo-cartographic innovations make it possible for hundreds of photographs taken from a helicopter to be meticulously compiled and plotted using GPS coordinates. The result is 3D imagery called “Continuous Topography” of a mountain in an unprecedented level of detail. However, despite being deeply informed by the uses and applications of the newest technologies, Holdsworth’s work refers openly to the history and tradition of landscape photography and mapping. Through his use of digital mapping data, Holdsworth expands the photographic process to develop a new aesthetic language that explores the changing nature of human perception in relation to that of our evolving science and technologies, at the interface of the geological and the virtual. Acceleration Structures: Dan Holdsworth’s “Acceleration Structures” allows us to see Europe’s most sublime landscapes in radically new ways. He reveals the structures of three Alpine glaciers that artists have attempted to capture for centuries, namely Argentière, Bossons, and Bionnassay. “Acceleration Structures” continues his project to reveal unseen parts of the world, through an innovative form of ‘cameraless photography’ called ‘photogrammetry’. These three-dimensional wireframe models are created through a combination of intense fieldwork where the artist documents every square foot of a particular area; and through a pioneering use of high-end software that correlates the measurements of each patch of land between them. From these measurements, the artist can create a model of the site in virtual space.
