Pleasant Places

Pleasant Places is a series of works initiated by Quayola in 2015 that explores the legacy of landscape painting and humanity's long-standing tradition of representing nature. Taking cues from Impressionism, Quayola employs advanced technology to observe natural patterns systematically. The outcomes of his studies are algorithmic compositions that seamlessly fuse nature and technology, representation and abstraction, and human and machine.

Through this body of work, Quayola offers a fresh interpretation of the natural world, one that highlights the role of technology as a collaborator. By utilizing these digital tools to explore the natural world, he seeks to redefine our understanding of nature and provoke a new appreciation for the possibilities that arise when humans and machines work in tandem.

Inspired by the work of Vincent Van Gogh, for PP_F_018_1 and PP_F_024_2, Quayola returned to the countryside of Provence 130 years later to capture some of the same iconic natural compositions and generate computational paintings by the analysis of ultra-high-definition videos. Employing custom software, the source videos are transformed into algorithmic animations resembling real paint, while simultaneously exploring new digital aesthetics.