[PRETTY PICTURA] with New Zealand Company

‘New Zealand with its distinctive atmospheres and skies, its forests of varied verdure, its many hued mountains, its play of waters in rivers and on rocky coasts and on smooth beaches…’ 1

A tourist brochure’s idyllic description of a New Zealand landscape! In the 1800s an England- based colonisation company, the ‘New Zealand Company’, instructed artists like Charles Heaphy to paint a pretty picture of New Zealand. ‘But New Zealand was hardly as accommodating as the pictures suggested. Expecting to find arable farmland, settlers discovered to their dismay cliffs and bushy gullies. It would take work to convert this wilderness into an Eden.’ 2

The screen saver series [PRETTY PICTURA] investigates this Eden, appropriating four prominent pretty pop New Zealand landscape paintings which have a stylistic quality similar to vector aesthetics used on the web. Parts of the paintings are digitally separated so as to animate [by code] events that occur throughout the everlasting panning landscape. An accompanying soundtrack [looped] adds a paradisiacal ambience.

[PRETTY PICTURA] addresses the issue of surface [the pretty landscape] with an underlining cynicism [repetition of the same, again and again]. Over time the animated passive works become rather dull and ridiculous as they continuously loop on the screen until the end user decides no more.

1. L. S. Fanning, ed. New Zealand Today, Dunedin, New Zealand, 1925, p.315.
2. R. Leonard, Headlands, MCA, Sydney, 1992, p.161.

[PRETTY PICTURA] is an Sean Kerr project for Korea Web Art