Between Landscape, Void, and Digital Matter
Interview by Nordrom Kunst
Norwegian artist Ingrid Bjørnaali works at the intersection of ecology, moving image, sound, and digital scanning technologies. Through photogrammetry, field recordings, and fragmented visual environments, her practice explores how contemporary technologies alter our perception of landscapes and living systems.
Rather than documenting nature as a stable reality, Bjørnaali transforms physical environments into unstable digital territories, spaces where matter dissolves, borders collapse, and ecosystems appear simultaneously familiar and alien. Her works often emerge from close observation of Nordic terrains, peatlands, volcanic surfaces, and fragile biotopes, combining scientific processes with poetic abstraction.
For Nordrom Kunst, we spoke with the artist about digital mediation, landscape perception, ecological estrangement, and the complex relationship between technology and the natural world.
Nordrom Kunst
In your work, nature is never simply documented but passes through scanning, mediation, and digital transformation. What do you feel is gained when a landscape is no longer seen directly, but through the imperfect language of technology?
Ingrid Bjørnaali
Nature experienced through technology is always so different from the physical experience of a landscape, and I like emphasising how documentation never is objective by working with these exaggerated digital translations.
Over time, I became interested in low-fi photogrammetry tools and in deliberately misusing scanning technologies rather than following their intended logic. Together with my partner, I developed a custom photogrammetry software that keeps the parameters more open and less adapted to an object-oriented, commodified way of seeing.
Digital systems operate through binary structures of presence or absence, materialising as mesh or no mesh, matter or void.
Wherever the software receives enough visual information, it builds a 3D model, and where information is missing, it generates emptiness.
In these scans, the ‘borders’ between trees, air and water often merge or become artificially reconstructed. By exposing these reinvented categories, I hope to reveal the actual entangledness and borderlessness of the physical ecosystems.
A peat bog, for example, seen through this lens can suddenly appear unfamiliar, almost other-dimensional: slick, hollow, and unstable. Perhaps this abstraction and estrangement allows us to encounter landscapes again as if seeing them for the first time.
For me, an important distinction to make is also that a landscape is never a scenery, but they are living biotopes that exist through their inherent species.
Nordrom Kunst
Some of your works seem to sit in a very interesting space between observation and distortion, where the image still comes from a real place or material, but no longer behaves like something stable or familiar. Are you interested in that moment when the natural world starts to feel slightly strange or unreachable?
Ingrid Bjørnaali
Yes, especially when digital scans are combined with sound recordings and analogue photography from the same site. I’m fascinated by how one single place can evoke different memories and mental places depending on the medium used to capture it.
Photogrammetry scans, on one hand, have methodological links to satellite mapping and systems of territorial observation. These from-above or distant perspectives are often associated with colonial ways of mapping ‘empty’ lands and presenting them as objective or scientific.
My own approach tries to move in the opposite direction. Instead of scanning vast territories scaled down from above, I focus on small areas and enlarge them.
I always keep the glitches and let the digital (mis)interpretations of the biotopes be as they are. The resulting virtual landscape becomes somewhat fictional, somewhat indexical to reality.
Sound also plays an important role in this process. In Extra Terrestriality, I combined field recordings with manipulated sounds created from physical materials connected to the site itself: water filtered through lava rock, the sound of asphalt being flattened, and my own voice attempting to imitate tectonic friction.
And I am also just nostalgic about early 2000s video games, I think, and how easy it was to slide or glitch out of the map into a limbo world outside of the designed space. Testing the limits of any given technology can reveal more of the fabric it is built on.
Nordrom Kunst
Your practice seems deeply connected to ecosystems and fragile environments, yet the works never feel purely documentary. Do you see your artistic process as a way of creating emotional proximity to places that are often overlooked or difficult to fully perceive?
Ingrid Bjørnaali
Through history, landscapes have always been interpreted in ways that leave space for the unknown and allow myths to exist within them. I think the way nature is largely marginalized in politics today calls for a re-mystification of landscapes, to move towards a non-quantifiable approach to nature again.
My approach to fragile environments is also influenced by spending time mapping and registering red-listed species in Norway’s Species Map Service, alongside other volunteers and biodiversity mappers. Our need for a tactile reading and our analog instruments like magnifiers dictate how we move; crawling, crouching, and in general moving close to the ground.
Both scanning and mapping a landscape like this differ from following a regular path from A to B, and makes me, as the guest in the landscape, clumsy, unstable and battling branches.
When I later animate my recordings with a virtual camera, I often practice a hand-held style and keep a rawness in the sound recordings. In this way, I feel I can keep the bodily experienced interaction with the landscape, inviting clumsiness as a way of working with the body in motion, so it can be inhabited by the liveliness of the world and against “automation for efficiency”.
Selected Works
Extra Terrestriality
Video work by Ingrid Bjørnaali.
Courtesy of the artist.
A multimedia work combining photogrammetry, field recordings, manipulated sound environments, and volcanic material references. The project explores geological transformation, ecological perception, and the instability of digitally reconstructed landscapes.
Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass
Collaborative video work by Ingrid Bjørnaali, Fabian Lanzmaier and Maria Simmons.
Courtesy of the artists.
An investigation into landscape fragmentation and material dissolution through digital scanning technologies and expanded moving image practices.
To See Without Man
Courtesy of the artists.
A reflection on non-human perspectives, environmental observation, and the limits of technologically mediated vision.
“Landscapes are never simply scenery. They are living biotopes.”
About the Artist
Ingrid Bjørnaali is a Norwegian artist working across moving image, sound, installation, and digital scanning technologies. Her practice examines ecological systems, mediated perception, and the relationship between technology, landscape, and environmental memory through experimental visual and sonic environments.
More information about Ingrid works can be found on her website: ingridbjornaali.com
Nordrom Kunst 