Orogenesis is a complex audiovisual arrangement which, through digital manipulation of image and sound, ties together classical cinematic ordering with more contemporary algorithmic ordering. The work’s layered electronic soundscape, created by Italian composer Daniele Ghisi, gives resonance to Boris Labbé’s animated video explorations.
Orogenesis is "a trip towards abstraction, as an hypothesis on how mountains might have been formed." The work is an evolving audiovisual cycle focusing on landscape. Generated with satellite imagery and 3D models from Google Earth as well as through a system of digital image processing, the video shows an aerial view of a mountain chain undergoing multiple metamorphoses. A traditional Pyrenean choir opens the soundtrack, in tribute to this mountain chain. With a long travelling shot, the transformations of the landscape remind us the compressions, ruptures and erosion of the ground; the sliding of the tectonic plates and of the continents or the movement of the magma and its crystallization.
In Orogenesis, recognisable representations are spliced, weaving in and out of each other to create an audiovisual topography whose structure and content are both familiar and unfamiliar. Gradually, entropy increases and the monolithic makes way for the microscopic.
