I wonder what the physical relationship is between the image, the replica, and the one depicted. It may be a crude thought, but I fear that the recording has to do with the demise of the recorded object, but more on that later. Photogrammetries are photographic scans of a three-dimensional body that are assembled into digital 3D replicas. A wide variety of mapping is done with this technique today. In the Songs Unsung series of images, there are four displays. They show minerals, an eroded shell limestone, a symbiotic relationship between fungi, lichens and a tree stump. One of them presents gray, white and greenish corals - the gray and white corals are dead. The data for these 3 D models came from a research project in which damaged coral reefs were photogrammetrically mapped. Researchers:inside predict that much of the world‘s reefs will die in the next 20 years. There are laboratory attempts to rebuild corals through artificially accelerated evolution to adapt them to the new climatic conditions. These hybrids will be used to restore the reefs. So in the future, corals will be artificial in two ways: there will be digital 3D replicas of the reefs that no longer exist, which were quickly removed like death masks before the animal bodies decayed to lime. At the same time - hopefully - new reefs with mutated corals have been created, but such landscapes will be prostheses. 

It is already clear that if immediate, drastic action is taken, many parts of our ecosystems and physical balances can be saved, but other parts will mutate, be makeshift substitutes, and be irretrievably lost. […]

Text by Beate Gütschow