Scanning a landscape has become routine. Photogrammetry on a phone, lidar in a tablet, splats from a handheld video — capturing a place in three dimensions is now something anyone can do in an afternoon. What’s rarer is a work that asks what the copy is for, and whether making it was an adequate response to what’s happening to the original.
Simon De Diesbach’s Limites is that work, and CreativeApplications put it back in front of people this month. It’s worth knowing about even though the film itself dates from 2022, screening in competition at the 2023 International Trickfilm Festival in Stuttgart. This is a profile rather than a news item.
The work
Limites runs 7 minutes 37 seconds. The subject is a forest in Rossens, Switzerland, where De Diesbach ran as a teenager while his father was ill. Running was how he coped. Returning years later, he found a gravel pit eating into the forest.
His response was to scan it: roughly 30 locations along the fitness trail, captured with a FARO Focus3D S70 terrestrial laser scanner. He recorded his own running with Xsens motion capture and assembled everything in Houdini, grading in DaVinci Resolve. The result is an autobiographical film in which a motion-captured figure runs through a point-cloud forest that is being destroyed in the physical world.
Why the doubt is the point
The easy version of this project is elegy: scan the disappearing thing, preserve it digitally, mourn beautifully. De Diesbach refuses that, and the refusal is what makes the piece good. The film explicitly questions “the limits of matter, and the limits of digital representations of nature,” and is critical of the pursuit of hyperrealism itself.
That’s a harder position to hold than it sounds, because the artist is simultaneously producing an extremely high-fidelity capture. A scanned forest is not a forest. It is a surface measurement, taken from thirty positions, that holds shape and no life. Making the copy does nothing to stop the gravel pit. A work that shows you an exquisite point cloud while doubting the value of exquisite point clouds is more honest about digital preservation than most of the archive-and-conserve rhetoric around scanning.
His stated references are unusually specific and worth following: video game design (particularly Breath of the Wild), Harun Farocki’s Parallel II — the series examining how game engines construct worlds and where those worlds’ edges are — and theatre aesthetics. That lineage explains the film’s most striking quality, which is the way it keeps showing you the boundaries of its own world rather than hiding them.
For anyone working with scanning as a medium, it’s a useful counterweight to the current enthusiasm: capture is not conservation, and resolution is not understanding.