Hypertopographics

Edward Burtynsky & Alkan Avcıoğlu

Artwork Description:

The systems humans have built, industrial, infrastructural, and technological, have grown so large and complex, and so deeply entangled with the environment, that they now require new ways of seeing and new forms of expression. Hypertopographics examines a world in which landscape is no longer primarily shaped by nature, but by vast systems of production, extraction, circulation, computation, and consumption. The work engages with systems and human impact on the environment whose scale has surpassed the limits of human comprehension. Industrial production, infrastructure, technological networks, and environmental transformation have expanded to a point where they can no longer be fully grasped through ordinary perception. The concept brings together two different frameworks: The idea of hyperobjects, as defined by Timothy Morton, entities so vast and distributed across space and time that they cannot be fully perceived or understood from a single perspective; and the observational logic of the New Topographics movement, a photographic approach focused on the documentation of man-made environments and systems. Hypertopographics extends both into a contemporary condition shaped by global interconnection and technological excess. The work is developed through a multi-stage generative process using multiple AI models and an iterative overprocessed refinement. The series takes over where traditional mediums fall short, using emergent tools such as generative AI to confront this overwhelming complexity. Each work in the series combines multiple spatial conditions within a single frame, extending photographic image making beyond the constraints of lens based capture.

Project Collaborators:

Heft Gallery