Mountains and Drop Shadows by Jan Robert Leegte

*Mountains are grand natural statements of sculptural expression. They are birthplaces of sublime monumentality and romanticism. Their crumbs are the raw materials that provided us with a long tradition of sculpture.*

*In another realm there is the ambiguous materiality of the digital, the human-made bits and bytes, in constant flow through systems, from which a new order of materials emerge at the surface of the interface. Among them is the user interface phenomenon of the drop shadow. A material bereft of all our notions of materiality, it being nothing but the absence of light cast upon a surface due to an obstructing object. In the work the shadow has been severed from a non existent casting object making it less then nothing. But also the drop shadow being a digital simulacrum adds another step deeper into ethereality, making it almost a shadow of shadows. This places it in direct opposition to the most earthly rooted of them all, the mountain.*

Mountains and Drop Shadows *is a continuation of a line of work going back to 2013, with the net art piece [https://www.mountainsanddropshadows.com](https://www.mountainsanddropshadows.com/) in which a live script would continuously fetch images tagged mountains from online databases. Because of this, the landscapes would become anonymised and delocalised, merely becoming an image, often ending as a humble desktop image.*

*For this most recent iteration of the work, querying databases felt like a thing of the past, as all those images have been added to the datasets of various image generating AI services.* Mountains and Drop Shadows, *2023 uses AI generated mountain images, a mashup of all images of existing mountains, fully erasing the subjectivity of the photographer and a-localising the image.*

*The work is a sculptural desktop standoff between a mountain dreamt up by the internet and a drop shadow. Embodiment vertigo on the summits of the interface.*

Jan Robert Leegte

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