For this exhibition the collaborative unnervingly intervene in serene walk-through forests in a study of camouflage and the use of disguise. Through meticulous examination and understanding of human vision and pattern generation and observations of movement and stillness in nature they have created a theatre of concealment and deception. Extracting scenery from three-dimensional gaming they toy with our perceptions in identification of the human form by way of a computer-generated world and a video installation.

The Summerbranch exhibition is the result of a 2 month residency at the Artsway Gallery in the New Forest. The artists spent two months in camouflage to experience their woodland surroundings first hand. Using tools of the military entertainment complex such as game engines and motion capture techniques they continued to examine the forest and collected photographic data to construct their own inhabited world. Modelled from and referencing the flora and fauna of the New Forest itself by growing specific trees from virtual seeds they have created an enchanting and at times ominous canopy of forest life.

The Summerbranch project culminated in a series of works including: Ghillie, NewForest, NeverSummerNights, Silent Spring & Summerbranch: a video installation, two virtual environments, a series of Lenticular prints and site specific Wall prints

(adapted from New Forest Pavilion, Venice Biennale catalogue)

Limited edition lenticular prints and custom made wall prints available for viewing on request.
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The Art of Simulation : 'The permanent co-evolution of cryptic characteristics, or camouflage, and the ability to detect camouflage for what it is, a simulation of the real, forms the dramatic theatre of forest life. This dense eco system is delicately balanced between moments of visibility and invisibility - the dappled light on a leaf turns out to be a clever duplication created by a leaf insect. When the same leaf insect turns out to be a computer-generated simulation of the real thing, the interplay of encrypted layers reminds us of the problematic status attributed to fixed notions of reality. Igloo's Summerbranch (2005/06), a simulation of the New Forest in Hampshire, England, performs a similar game of hide-and-seek with reality - following a Baudrillardian logic, the installation simulates the forest environment, throwing into jeopardy the category of the 'originary' by both propagating the precession of simulacra and subtly modifying the understanding of what the 'originary' could be (in this case, the notion of 'nature') - one can't help but wonder what else is veiled or concealed in this forest.

Igloo's appropriation of military camouflage techniques and a computer gaming engine, continue this play between the 'real' and the 'imaginary'. As camouflage developed in response to aerial photography during the early Twentieth Century, it heralded the start of a new war paradigm, where beginnings and endings were destabilised, panoramas visually occluded and illusory, appearances susceptible to correction, identities made malleable. The playful, continually changing surface of Summerbranch gives legitimacy to Hillel Schwartz's assertion that camouflage today cannot be conceived merely as a trompe l'oeil, rather it must be acknowledged “as central to the way we make peace as [well as] the way we conduct our wars”(1).

By prompting connections between simulation and camouflage, and providing civilian sympathies and applications for military practice, Summerbranch repositions critical themes of current cultural production. On reaching the edge of the installation, we come face to face with legacies of land (art) and the future of earthly habitats. Through simulating and reconfiguring representations of our environment it implicates itself in the continually changing narrative of nature and its parallel development with technology. Summerbranch brings to the foreground our politically-charged preoccupations with topological Interior and Exterior - the dialogue of reconciling a sophisticated, highly technologised world with competing narratives about the resources and uses of our environment.'
- Colm Lally & Cecilia Wee 2007

(1) Hillel Schwarz, Culture of the Copy, Zone Books, New York, 1996 p.208

Rob Meyers Review:
http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews/igloo-summerbranch