The Nanite Garden, 2024

Spencer Yard, Leamington Spa Cultural Quarter, Warwickshire

Produced for Complex Development Projects and Warwick District Council. Winner of the Leamington Society Art 2024.

This public art commission for Spencer Yard, Leamington Spa, draws inspiration from the town’s significant gaming industry. It responds to the site’s history as the home to the Camofleurs and its future use as digital creative production hub, and home of The Fold.

It combines state-of-the-art digital techniques such as digital sculpting and 5-axis milling,  with traditional hand-crafting. The  1,000s of small multi-coloured triangles, carefully colour-matched to those of the Nanite technology the artwork is referencing, were hand painted.

The artwork considers the effect of digital animation and visualisation on both art and the lived experience, and how this relates formally and conceptually to the Camoufleurs; artists who had been enlisted to creatively camouflage and protect sensitive sites in the UK, and were based at the site. Put simply, the Camoufleurs were commissioned to use artistic techniques to distort perception and a sense of reality. Today, the biggest distortions to our perception are created in the virtual world but impact the physical, where what is fake and what is real becomes harder and harder to distinguish and is even a matter of conjecture.

As if dropped from a digital or virtual world, the sculptures instigate a moment of surprise, consideration and reflection. The source material is ‘off-the-shelf’ digital assets created in Game Engines using Nanite-enabled meshes. Nanite Triangle Visualization is a high specification digital rendering tool that allows images to hold their detail in fast paced games or movies. Nanite Virtualized Geometry by Unreal Engine, and other proprietary processing systems, are changing the face of digital content possibilities.

“Unless you know there’s a gaming hub here you will not see anything about it on the street level. There’s a sense that these big game studios all feel completely separate with their individual campuses all off in different places.”

Shaun Wall, local games developer.