Background Scenery is a video work constructed from digitally manipulated film landscapes—scenes meticulously stripped of all human presence and re-animated through a virtual camera. By erasing their original subjects and contexts, the artist severs these cinematic backdrops from the time and space they once represented. What remains are not indexical records of real places, but hollowed-out cultural sites: fragments of shared pop-cultural memory, untethered and unstable, much like the dislocated terrains of online experience.
This reworking of cinematic space brings the function of the camera itself into question. If all camera images imply a viewer—whose gaze do digital images belong to when that viewer is no longer rooted in physical space? By stitching together disparate landscapes under the illusion of a single, continuous viewpoint, the piece proposes a new kind of subjectivity: one detached from bodily presence, mediated entirely through digital perception.
Moreover, the work underscores its own artificiality. Through exaggerated distortions—stretching, compressing, reorienting—the camera is revealed not as an optical instrument imitating human sight, but as a fluid, code-based entity unconstrained by the limits of physical vision.
Referencing André Bazin’s claim that cinema’s evolution, from Orson Welles’ deep focus to the tracking shot, represented a cultural drive toward "total and complete representation of reality," Background Scenery interrogates that legacy. In the age of digital media, the pursuit of realism has given way to the embrace of fabrication. Here, landscapes are no longer places—they are simulations, echoes of cinematic memory reprocessed by machines, signaling a cultural shift from documentation to disembodiment.