New World - Jan Robert Leegte

New World develops further Jan Robert Leegte‘s artistic research in which the web is understood as a place to live, to explore and to reinvent. The artist combines the deconstruction of digital elements, such as selection marquees and scrollbars, with the appropriation of elements taken from digital depictions of a real or realistic landscape, as Google Maps and the videogame Minecraft. Leegte dissects these elements for their aesthetic ans sculptural properties, creating art works that redefine our relationship with the space and its digital representation. New World is a random digital landscape to travel and to explore, based on a geometrical abstract composition that reshapes the Earth landscape from a digital perspective. The interaction, even if reduced to the minimal game mechanic of navigation, leads us to discover a world that is at the same time always new and similar to itself: a digital maze endlessly and randomly generated while we explore it.

Jan Robert Leegte started working as an artist on the Internet in 1997 and has been a contributor to the renowned surf club Nasty Nets. As an artist he tries to explore the position of the new material put forward by the (networked) computer. Selection marquees, scrollbars, Google Maps, code and software are dissected for their sculptural properties. His work have been presented at many museum and galleries including: Whitechapel Gallery (London), MOTI museum (Den Bosch – NL), iMal (Brussels), 319 Scholes (NY).