The Aesthetic Rover is a sculptural robot that intervenes in a selected landscape. we employed a device that is both technological and disembodied: a custom robot that awkwardly moves sculptural objects through outdoor spaces. Fracturing our perceptual field and causing us to consider the boundary between natural and unnatural, this intervention acts as a aesthetic interference.
The project proposes an intervention into our contemporary view of landscape. In the modern world we have forever lost the experience of a unmediated landscape; we can neither arrive in, or experience, landscape in the ways that were possible before modern technology intervened in our relationship with nature.Our interest in these orchestrated movements is the tenuous, obscure and disintegrating line between nature and technology, and the possibility of visually amplifying this imprecise demarcation.
Documented in five high-definition videos, the Rover runs by remote control, placing itself in nature as a device for aesthetic, rather than scientific, explorations, amplifications and interventions.