RELENTLESS
RELENTLESS
In 2021, Dan Moore collaborated with Angus Andrew of Liars on RELENTLESS, a generative audiovisual work developed from a 3D reconstruction of a cave near Andrew’s home in the Australian bush.
The work begins with an act of traversal. Andrew entered the cave with a 360-degree camera, recording high-definition spherical video from within the space. That footage was later used to reconstruct the cave as a digital environment, translating a physical site into a mutable volumetric image. What might have remained documentation became, instead, a terrain for transformation.
Built inside a 3D game engine, RELENTLESS is not a fixed video in the traditional sense. It is a system that can run indefinitely. The cave becomes a real-time environment, capable of continuously generating image compositions in response to sound. Audio drives the work’s behavior, influencing which frames are selected, how surfaces move, how materials shimmer, and how the composition evolves over time. Some decisions happen live inside the engine. Others are shaped by offline processes and embedded back into the system as latent visual possibilities.
The resulting image moves with an almost oppressive slowness. Glowing red spheres hover in darkness, their heat suggesting both celestial bodies and industrial warning lights. Reflective forms ripple beneath them, liquid and metallic, catching the sound as if it were a physical force. Horizontal bands shear through the frame, interrupting the illusion of depth and exposing the image as a layered signal. The cave is present, but only as a ghost: a source geometry dissolved into light, rhythm, and distortion.
In this sense, RELENTLESS treats reconstruction not as recovery, but as destabilization. The camera captures a site. The software rebuilds it. The engine keeps it alive. The audio unsettles it. What remains is a space caught between memory and machine perception, between landscape and interface. It is neither natural nor synthetic, but something produced through their collision.
The collaboration brings together Andrew’s long-standing interest in repetition, pressure, and psychological atmosphere with Moore’s practice of building systems that negotiate images rather than simply render them. Here, the computer listens. It selects. It interrupts. It turns the cave into an instrument and the song into a force that acts upon matter.
RELENTLESS occupies a space between tour visual, digital sculpture, generative cinema, and real-time simulation. It is slow, molten, and unstable. A private landscape becomes a shared hallucination. A cave in the bush becomes a reflective chamber for sound. The work does not illustrate music. It is shaped by it, frame by frame, endlessly, until place itself begins to pulse.
