New York-based artist-designer Ceren Arslan creates architectures and environments from digital data for hyper-realistic visual experiences.
Architectural designs have become an important part of the digital age in the last decade. Modeling software and advanced technologies are pushing the limits of photographic realism, blurring the boundaries between real and virtual. These hyper-realistic renderings now serve as communication tools for artists, designers, architects, and other creators, immersing the Internet user in aesthetic and emotional atmospheres. Ceren Arslan is a perfect example. This 26-year-old American virtuoso combines digital tools, craft techniques, and digital data in her compositions to create scenes that generate new narrative realities. Inspired by Ricardo Bofill, Luis Barragán, and Peter Zumthor, but also by Diana Vreeland and Wes Anderson, Ceren Arslan already has an impressive portfolio in its visual, artistic and graphic quality.
Trompe-l’oeil
Her first project, Episodes, is a series of 2D collages using digital data shared on the Internet and depicting imaginary buildings named after known cities. With EXIT, she expands the concept into 3D via spaces she calls “pre-fictive,” deepening her research on the influence of digital resources. She questions the culture and creation of the architectural image where transformed environments, which do not exist today, have the potential to become so in the future. It is through the captured imperfections of real life (textures, materials, patterns) that she achieves this level of absolute authenticity. EXIT is thus defined as an exit from our world to better enter a new fictional reality. Today, Ceren Arslan continues to evolve her project with other mediums, such as video, animation, music, and painting, while retaining the objective of being able to concretely build what she creates digitally.
Credit Exit Series © Ceren Arslan
Portrait photo credit © Semina Bildik
Nathalie Dassa