Silicon Serpent and VFX showreel materials – exploring ideas and themes of dystopic AI-led technologies that transport users to experience the world within digital utopias.
I am a VFX professional already working freelance in the creative industries. I work with open-source coding and simulations in geometry software. I am interested in themes associated with science fiction dystopias and man versus machine scenarios. For my major project, I have developed a folio of experimental animations that combine point cloud, Houdini/photogrammetry/AE/Black magic 6K desktop production. I aim to establish a career in high-end cinema VFX compositing and working on high budget advertising.
My major work presents visuals that invoke potential future scenarios in which the entirety of humanity has been distracted to live in a dystopic AI-led technology experience – an alternate world within a digital utopia. Silicon Serpent is a digitally produced 3D pictorial image – a simulation of an ancient woodland world that frames and presents the uncanny monumentally discarded ruins of obsolescent computer technology deeply wired into the earth with thick vine-like cables. The image is designed to draw and reflect on technological hyper-progress – the perfect forest experience is re-envisioned by software creation to make work that poetically invokes our uncanny engagement with the simulated and the virtual within the art and design industry and cinema. The project explores overlapping themes of biotechnology, evolution, artificial intelligence and bio-architecture and their impact on human society and behaviour.
The work is also a comment on the way that global corporate interests have the power to use data to affect our concepts of nature and impact our biological/evolutionary future. The imagery, weight and heaviness of the monumental computer hardware and its mycelial wiring into the forest floor is a comment on its invisible and invasive power to dissociate individuals and societies from their lived experience and to diminish the spiritual power of nature into a realm of fantasy. The work implies the importance of forests as places for private mindful, direct sensory experience – and the complexity of our relationship with pervasive technology such as smartphones and devices that have come to haunt human life.
The detailed pictorial image is entirely artificial – I aimed to make a photo-realistic world that is aesthetically indistinguishable from the real. The world was produced from software that uses the algorithms and physics of growth and generative algorithms, gravity and natural turbulence as a process. The archetypes, legends and myths of the forest are juxtaposed with our contract with technology with magical elements diminished – replaced by the pervasive sickness-inducing nature of smartphones and social media. The image and iconography is a commentary on the status of contemporary life, our reliance on data and technology and the fragile status of our connection to nature. My professional showreel is here:
BA (Hons) Fine Art - Farnham 
Cristina Ene | Fine Art
