Plastic Vista – Ronan Devlin Studio

Artwork | Digital | Environmental

Plastic Vista
Gestural, screen-mediated photography
2025/26

Plastic Vista looks at how constant screen use is reshaping perception.

I made a series of 30-second films of everyday environments, then re-photographed them from a laptop screen placed on my knees, replaying the footage. Using an iPhone’s panorama mode, I slowly rotate on a swivel chair, forcing the camera to misread motion and reconstruct the moving image as still, panoramic, scenes.

This process translates time into a single image, generating fluid colour fields and spatial drift. The original scene is digitised, then digitised again through gestural motion, becoming harder to locate and less tied to a fixed viewpoint.

The works aim to subvert digital production by bringing the image back into a physical situation, where it becomes material — something engaged through body movement and photography. They push against the proliferation of synthetic imagery generated by large language models and so-called AI systems, reintroducing physical action, process, and error into the production of images, using the camera as a mark-making tool.

The images appear calm and resolved, but point to a loss of direct engagement, where the screen becomes the dominant site of experience.

CREDITS:
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Artist: Ronan Devlin