Synthetic LandscapeS

Synthetic Landscape is part of an ongoing investigation into how artificial intelligence, error, and traditional artistic practice intersect to reshape our understanding of landscape. Rather than presenting nature as a stable subject, the work refracts it through layers of computation and painterly translation. What emerges is not a depiction of place, but a terrain in flux: synthetic yet organic, fractured yet whole.

The project began with the training of a custom AI model using two distinct datasets. The first contained images of natural environments: mountains, forests, and skies. The second was drawn from a Unity-built forest simulation, which was processed through the Moore’s own glitch shader pipelines to produce ruptures, distortions, and digital artifacts. Together, these datasets taught the model to oscillate between serenity and collapse, producing images that suggested landscapes but resisted resolution.

From this hybrid space, fragments were selected as source material for the final painting. These machine-born images were then realized in oil on canvas by a skilled painter in China, bringing technical precision and material depth to forms first conceived in code. The translation from algorithmic hallucination to physical brushstroke underscores the layered networks of labor, craft, and technology that shape contemporary art practice.

By merging generative AI with traditional painting, the work asks how computational systems imagine space and how error can serve as an aesthetic principle rather than a failure. It also highlights the global infrastructures that underpin art-making today, where the “digital” and the “handmade” are not opposites but collaborators. The result is a hybrid landscape that resists categorization: not purely natural, not purely synthetic, but a speculative terrain suspended between code and canvas.

The image to the right Latent Fragments of a Synthetic Landscape is currently on display at Vacation Forever as part of their New Yorks Finest group show.