A take on how Digital Tools have helped revive Surrealism as an art.
Digital surrealism in Architecture is about blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. It plays on your sense of vision by creating dream like scenes or spaces utilizing elements of architecture and placing them in equally dream like scenic backgrounds. You can also call it Architecture from an aesthetic point of view.
Digital Surrealism is an art. It’s an expression of the Artist’s subconscious. In Architecture, It’s a manipulation of the human eye and is achieved by using 3D & Rendering softwares or any other digital tool to create imaginary, feel good Architectural spaces.
The Digital Era
The advent of digital tools in Architecture.
21st Century saw widespread use of the internet and thus came to be known as the INFORMATION AGE or DIGITAL ERA. This made information, software, tools, and apps easily available to everyone with an active internet connection. This is when architecture as a profession touched new heights as more and more digital tools and platforms came to light. From 3D rendering software to virtual reality for construction to 3D printing architectural models or using AI within the design process, it is now increasingly rare that an architecture project does not use some sort of a digital tool.
3D & Rendering software have been crucial to the design process since their advent because of two very significant reasons. First, Architecture being a very detail oriented profession, these software reduce the time taken to complete these tedious tasks by ten folds. With the ever growing fluidity of physical structures, the tools in these software help minimise the complexity of the whole process and reduce the scope of mistakes. Though strenuous 3Ds can definitely make or break a project. They allow us to achieve an accuracy that may not have been possible otherwise. Not to forget, visualizing your designs in 3D before the construction starts allows one to make necessary changes or redesign as needed. Second, our Society as a whole is majorly occular-centric in its way of life. We have always given our sense of sight more weightage than the rest and by doing exactly that. 3D software became a major tool to help clients understand the design better as technical drawings could be beyond their understanding. It helps clients to be more in touch with the Design process and is a great tool to attract potential clients too.
In fact, with the tremendous increase in demand of 3Ds because of how they sit on the eyes, a large number of independent Image design and photo-realistic rendering studios are popping up around the world and what they deliver is utter perfection. So, it should come as no surprise that more and more designers are now using these software to develop designs that exist deep within their minds to attract and manipulate the vision and produce aesthetic renders.
The shift to Digital Surrealism.
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be the shackles limiting our vision”. ~Dali
Dali was one of the big names of the surrealist movement along with Poet André Breton who founded the movement in Paris in 1924. Surrealism’s goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism.
Surrealism in Architecture has no bounds. It exists as an extension to architecture but without the limits of physics. Obviously, when I say digital surrealism, it implies everything being created on a computer screen. The presence of digital tools has now revived the surrealism movement but also brought a major shift in the medium. Digital tools are now preferred over the traditional hand painting method but both produce strange and dreamy art. Sans logic or physics, surrealism projects set the imagination free.
This article is an effort to capture the true essence of dreamy and surreal spaces that exist in the imagination of an artist, reimagined through Architecture and it’s tools. Surreal art from some social media famous 3D artists have been taking the instagram world by storm. You can find all of them right below. Hope this makes you go WOW❗
Artist: Alexis Christodoulou ( https://www.instagram.com/teaaalexis/ )
Artist: Massimo Colonna (https://www.instagram.com/m.a.s.s.i.m.o.c.o.l.o.n.n.a/)
Artist: Benoit Challand (https://www.instagram.com/benoitchalland/)
Artist: Sixnfive Studio (https://www.instagram.com/sixnfive/)
Artist: Andrés Reisinger (https://www.instagram.com/reisingerandres/)
Artist: Charlotte Taylor (https://www.instagram.com/charlottetaylr/)
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