Digital Land Art about the materials that make it possible. Ideas for common ground between android dreams of electric sheep & human desires to live forever.

M3T4S

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M3T4 B4S3

Alusta means “base” or “platform” but could also mean “from the beginning”. The digital sculpture M3T4 B4S3 operates at this fundamental level: a pedestal for what underlies us all and our origins. The Earth. The digital sculpture is a version of Piero Manzoni’s “Base of the World (Socle du Monde, 1961)” updated for the information age with a twist of Finnish art history.

The ideal way to experience M3T4 B4S3 is by viewing it in Artificial Reality (AR) and scaling it up until it is the tallest thing around. This way, if the Earth would fall, M3T4 B4S3 would catch it and save us all!

Going back to the beginning of this piece, this is the conceptual platform it was built on:

– The first criteria for creating this artwork was to make something that could not otherwise exist. Digital sculpture combined with AR allows the artist to produce their vision in a way that far exceeds all material and physical limitations of traditional sculpture. Not to mention transcending formal artistic conventions like the frame or wall-centricity (“seinäkeskeisyys” as coined by the director of The Finnish National Gallery, Kimmo Levä).

– The first building of The Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum, opened in 1887 – the same year the creator of the first “readymade”, Marcel Duchamp, was born.

– The first time the artist learnt about the above coincidence was on Wikipedia – a common knowledge base on the internet. It also functions as a precursor to the public, free and crowdsourced web3 platforms like Alusta.

– The first device used by the artist to access the internet was the ViewMaster CRT-monitor which this artwork re-imagines in weatherproof steel.

– The first “artworks” made in the area of modern Finland were rock paintings made in red iron-oxide (same chemical which gives weatherproof steel its colour) likely made from hematite minerals, blood and animal fat. An example of this kind of rock art pictograph can be seen as faint red marks on the monitor’s screen in the modified Wikipedia Commons screenshot.

– The first “artwork” by the artist, too, was most likely a stick figure - albeit not as a graffiti on top of a rock painting (seen in the artwork as blue marks on the screen). The iconoclasm of the vandalised rock painting represents the break between what the National Gallery is commonly thought to do and what it is doing with Alusta.

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The entire digital artwork is released under the CC0-license and the resources used in the making of it were:
* CRT Computer Monitor by Sketchfab user fizyman released under CC BY 4.0 DEED https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/crt-computer-monitor-f2ff0013f86e4cd0a2aee183a23bdfee
* Rust Coarse 01 by Poly Haven users Dimitrios Savva and Rico Cilliers released under CC0 https://polyhaven.com/a/rust_coarse_01
* Pakanavuori sotkettu.JPG by Wikimedia Commons user Ilarius released under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pakanavuori_sotkettu.JPG

M3T4 B4S3

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