Warm Fire 2019

Curator: Digital artist Beeple created this intriguing landscape titled "Warm Fire" in 2019. Editor: "Warm Fire" it isn't, but cool tones aside, there's something serene, almost unsettling about this landscape. Those massive, stylized palm trees almost overwhelm the soft, sandy foreground. Curator: They are quite stylized, yes, perhaps even deliberately artificial. Look at how they repeat and fill the middle ground of the composition. We see Beeple here referencing the familiar trope of the tropical vista while unsettling our expectation of it. It gives us something uncanny to chew on, doesn’t it? Editor: Indeed. The materiality, or lack thereof given it’s a digital rendering, is fascinating. I wonder what tools he uses and the labor behind rendering such soft light effects? The means by which something as familiar as palm trees are reshaped into a product almost as comforting and repeatable as manufactured goods. Curator: Absolutely! The formal tension of the perfect orbital, almost looming presence of this geometrical object reminds me of the celestial orbs present in pre-renaissance icons, or even tapestries that denote not the celestial heavens above, but our understanding of a space, place, or idea in totality. The cool pastels speak to this too – these cool pastel colors indicate calmness, distance, or a space where it’s less about the physical warmth and more about understanding and meaning. Editor: A total aesthetic product of the digital era! Each form is almost modular and infinitely reproducible in another rendering. Curator: It certainly feels this way! "Warm Fire" gives us an experience with multiple entryways to experience a simulated world and a new space of imagination, where we come to our new symbolic relationship with the environment, objects, and ultimately ourselves. Editor: For me, the strength here resides precisely in making me ponder digital labor and commodification through those rendered forms of paradise. Something strangely meditative.