It is from above that the landscapes of No Man’s Sky reveal their true nature. While you are navigating their rolling expanses, picking a path between valleys and mountains with staccato jet pack bursts, they seem convincingly designed, perhaps almost intended. But from above they take on a whorled, piebald, almost fungal quality. The quality of something grown, not made.
It’s a quality that, rather than reinforce the unique novelty and technical prowess of No Man’s Sky, instead serves to connect its generative nature back to a history of planetscapes and landscapes far older than its algorithms would suggest. We might think first of the work of Doug Trumbull, the effects artist whose work on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tree of Life was done in Petri dishes and water tanks, mixing pigments and chemicals into glassy spheres of milk to create swirling gas giants. Then there’s the surface of Alien’s iconic LV426 as seen from orbit, which was created by pouring aluminium paint into a shallow tray of white spirit. The resulting generative chemical reaction produced an orbital view suitably encrusted with detail, its organic shapes suggesting, not describing, the planet’s storm-wracked expanse. The technique had been invented by SFX technician Dennis Lowe while he was an art student. Perhaps, we might imagine, studying Max Ernst’s use of “frottage” and “declomania” to create surreal landscapes.
A whorled, piebald, almost fungal quality. The quality of something grown, not made.
Ernst’s Europe After the Rain II, perhaps his most iconic image, was created in this fashion, it’s biological, calcified, alien landscape generated through the random movement of paint against glass, then tamed by the addition of a pastel blue sky. So when we gaze at No Man’s Sky’s planets from above, we are looking not just at a process of random growth, but a history of artists stepping back from intention, in order to evoke something truly alien.
It is from above that the landscapes of No Man’s Sky reveal their true nature. While you are navigating their rolling expanses, picking a path between valleys and mountains with staccato jet pack bursts, they seem convincingly designed, perhaps almost intended. But from above they take on a whorled, piebald, almost fungal quality. The quality of something grown, not made.
It’s a quality that, rather than reinforce the unique novelty and technical prowess of No Man’s Sky, instead serves to connect its generative nature back to a history of planetscapes and landscapes far older than its algorithms would suggest. We might think first of the work of Doug Trumbull, the effects artist whose work on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tree of Life was done in Petri dishes and water tanks, mixing pigments and chemicals into glassy spheres of milk to create swirling gas giants. Then there’s the surface of Alien’s iconic LV426 as seen from orbit, which was created by pouring aluminium paint into a shallow tray of white spirit. The resulting generative chemical reaction produced an orbital view suitably encrusted with detail, its organic shapes suggesting, not describing, the planet’s storm-wracked expanse. The technique had been invented by SFX technician Dennis Lowe while he was an art student. Perhaps, we might imagine, studying Max Ernst’s use of “frottage” and “declomania” to create surreal landscapes.
Ernst’s Europe After the Rain II, perhaps his most iconic image, was created in this fashion, it’s biological, calcified, alien landscape generated through the random movement of paint against glass, then tamed by the addition of a pastel blue sky. So when we gaze at No Man’s Sky’s planets from above, we are looking not just at a process of random growth, but a history of artists stepping back from intention, in order to evoke something truly alien.
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