Skinscape

Skinscape is a VR artwork by UK-based artist Ian Truelove, who uses digital technology to explore new ways of making paintings. It scales one of his digital paintings across a landscape several square kilometres wide, where you move between viewpoints to see different compositions of colour and form.

A painted digital landscape

The valleys and hills are shaped by human gestures rather than algorithms; every part of the world is hand-painted. The original painting’s pixels remain visible as sharp-edged, mosaic-like textures. Each pixel maps to a polygon whose height is set by the intensity of the painted pixel. The pixels and polygons do not shine or cast shadows, leaving the artwork’s digital qualities exposed rather than simulating the physical world.

Skinscape draws on Truelove’s experience of seeing Leon Kossoff’s Seated Nude (1960) at York Art Gallery. The heavily striated, semi-abstract painting left him disoriented and without a sense of scale, as if he were floating above a vast landscape of colour and form. Skinscape recreates a lasting version of that experience.

Move through the artwork

You point a laser across the landscape and release the controller’s touch-pad button to jump to the spot it indicates. Each viewpoint presents a different version of the painting. Activating the laser also displays a map to help you locate the individual artworks.

Additional paintings

Alongside the giant painted landscape, Skinscape contains 27 flat digital paintings, 27 spatial kinetic paintings and 27 hemispherical paintings.