Alvaro Rodríguez Badel is an artist and film producer from Bogotá – Colombia, a country he has been discovering and has influenced his work due to its imminent biodiversity and magic. He creates all his works underlined by the idea of representing nature through digital mediums by exploring how logical or computing processes understand the world around us. How do computers or logical systems perceive or represent nature?

Having a mostly self-taught understanding of computer software, 360 cameras, 3D scanning techniques, or any other contemporary digital imagery technique, Rodríguez Badel ends up playing around with and exploring new ways of representing the world, always trying to land in new unexplored universes. That is how gigantic 3D Scans of mountains or waterfalls end up being printed with such quality and precision that you face yourself against a new way of perceiving a landscape. Or how 3D models of real tiny rocks create vast landscapes when their scale is dramatically changed inside a virtual reality experience.

The work he is presenting at GlogauAIR Open Studios is a series of 2-dimensional vectors (mathematical formulas to represent movements) that draw some trees, information that later is processed by a 2-axis drawing robot that creates the final piece. Alvaro has been 3D scanning and documenting the oldest trees in his hometown, some of which are more than 200 years old. The outcome is a series of drawings, 3D images, and videos that document the vegetation of Bogotá while the pandemic is happening all over the world.