Commissioned art project  ︎︎  with Random Studio

We reached out to Luciano, who is currently travelling around the globe with his girlfriend Caroline, to ask him to make a piece of work from his off-the-grid, self-made bus. Inspired by the otherworldly natural environments he has encountered on his trip, Luciano was interested in translating this feeling of awe and discovery into the digital realm. His commission invites us on a winding journey through the uncanny, fractal terrains of a world he created from scratch.

Usually working with Cinema 4D, this project gave Luciano free reign to leave his comfort zone and explore some unknown territory through using a software called Artmatic. The software has its roots in the work done by a group of mathematicians, artists, musicians and scientists who were creating radical graphic programmes during the eighties. Using these skills, Artmatic was founded by one of its members to “create new realms of creative expression” and liberate users from the conventions of traditional, expensive software, instead offering them an accessible tool to produce artwork.

Described by Luciano as “photoshop on acid”, the programme has a powerful feature that allows you to create and explore artificial landscapes and planets that follow their own internal logic. The possibilities of these new territories are literally endless. “These landscapes and planets are infinite,” he says. And so the process itself became a journey of discovery: a drift through an ever-evolving, fractal macrocosm. Moving through this new nature, things work almost like they should but with an uncanny twist. “I wanted to make something that looked natural, but somehow it’s placed somewhere else. It could be another world,” he explains.

Spanning countries as well as physical and digital realities, the project also opened the door on some different modes of making work. Logging in to Random’s infrastructure remotely, the studio became nomadic. “For a second, I imagined this future of lots of people being all over the world and the studio is completely empty with the computers on. People are working there, but not physically. It kind of happened in a way…”