Landfall, Collapse - Video Still

Stefanie Loveday

»Landfall, Collapse«, reinterprets the manufactured landscape of an opencast coal mine in what is now Cottbuser Ostsee, Germany. The work examines the temporal nature of the mine as a site of changing geography: the erasure of a rural town for the purpose of geological extraction, and the current process of »re- naturing« the site as a lake destination for local tourism. Drawing from the transformation of the human-altered landscape, the work shows an environment of abstracted forms. “Landfall” uses a drone to show the open pit from above. The slow and fluid camera movements show patterns and excavation markings that look like an expansive earthwork drawing. From this perspective, the video mimics the views of landscapes documented by satellite imagery. “Collapse” examines the same mine using a Google Earth VR recording. This presents an artificial version of the same landscape created by digital mapping of satellite imagery. The resulting rendering artifacts are measured in the video as virtual geological features, further abstracting the landscape.