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 3 D 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. This happens while most people in the Western hemisphere do not think about the physical and biological foundations of their existence in their own actions, because they perceive „nature“ as a static, permanently existing counterpart. This peculiar separation between nature and man can also be observed in the history of Western images: Landscape as an independent pictorial topos emerged shortly before the European Enlightenment. Two centuries earlier, the central perspective made its way into the pictorial worlds, and nature already became an object that was observed, depicted, and measured. Imaging became more and more meticulous, starting in the 19th century with photography and today also with photogrammetry. To image the corals described above in 3D space, a lot of electricity is needed. In addition, both the manufacture of the cameras and the computers consume significant resources. This objection may seem ridiculous for the images in this book, because Annkathrin Kluss recycled the digital models and deliberately constructed the 3D landscapes simply. Only in other fields the dimension becomes clear, e.g. in autonomous driving. This requires fully digital replicas of our environments, each read out with changes in real time. Computer technology currently generates as much CO2 as global air traffic. To me, the mania of recording, of imaging, seems like a holding on to break the cycle of natural decay. But perhaps data has always been collected primarily for monetary profit maximization. The coral reef ecosystem is only a harbinger, other systems will follow unless we act now. With all consequence. If not, at some point extraterrestrial beings will find a digital replica of our world in an empty world and declare us stupid. 

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 3 D 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. This happens while most people in the Western hemisphere do not think about the physical and biological foundations of their existence in their own actions, because they perceive „nature“ as a static, permanently existing counterpart. This peculiar separation between nature and man can also be observed in the history of Western images: Landscape as an independent pictorial topos emerged shortly before the European Enlightenment. Two centuries earlier, the central perspective made its way into the pictorial worlds, and nature already became an object that was observed, depicted, and measured. Imaging became more and more meticulous, starting in the 19th century with photography and today also with photogrammetry. To image the corals described above in 3D space, a lot of electricity is needed. In addition, both the manufacture of the cameras and the computers consume significant resources. This objection may seem ridiculous for the images in this book, because Annkathrin Kluss recycled the digital models and deliberately constructed the 3D landscapes simply. Only in other fields the dimension becomes clear, e.g. in autonomous driving. This requires fully digital replicas of our environments, each read out with changes in real time. Computer technology currently generates as much CO2 as global air traffic. To me, the mania of recording, of imaging, seems like a holding on to break the cycle of natural decay. But perhaps data has always been collected primarily for monetary profit maximization. The coral reef ecosystem is only a harbinger, other systems will follow unless we act now. With all consequence. If not, at some point extraterrestrial beings will find a digital replica of our world in an empty world and declare us stupid.