Despite the seeming contradiction between the ‘real world’ and our digital lives, nature is one of the primary subject matters treated in the works of digital artists today. Using new technologies and digital tools, artists have long explored the frontier of our increasing digital presence and what this means for our interactions with the natural environment. Within this lens, topics such as the continued impact of humankind on climate change, and what a natural world could look like in a purely technological age have arisen.

Embracing the broad theme of ‘nature’, five artists reveal what the importance of the natural world in a digital age means to them in Artpoint’s third NFT collection: TERRA-BYTE. Vartist, a world builder and creator of metaverses, imagines what a natively digital environment could look like, in a vibrant colour palette and pattern inspired by organic forms. Elsewhere, we stumble upon the augmented still lifes of Hannes Hummel, who takes an age-old art historical subject matter - the Flemish still life - and brings it to life with a unique, distinctly technological twist. Tapping into the meditative and healing properties of nature, Patty Madden presents her idyllic environments, adorned with architectural accents and hypnotic repetitive movements that are intended to encourage a sense of peace within the viewer. For Franz Rosati, a triptych of generative artworks depicts three hypothetical landscapes, generated through an AI algorithm that processed topographic images to produce a world that could exist in reality… and yet they are the imagination of the machine. Lastly, the mesmerising time-lapse videos of Jamie Scott ground us back to reality, unravelling in slow motion the themes of life, death, beauty, and the impermanence of time.

In TERRA-BYTE, each artist’s vision of nature in the digital age is just a snap shot of how the natural world coexists with technology today. The discourse is pluridisciplinary, evolving, and will undoubtedly produce new challenges and critical messages to convey as society becomes more and more digital. The question this exhibition poses is this: what could it look like to live in a digital-natural world? With TERRA-BYTE, at least the possibility is easy on the eyes.