The Lake

The Lake is one of Blue Soup’s key works, in which their visual language is in its fully formed and recognizable shape. A deceptively simple landscape, created with architectural precision using 3D graphics, features a circular lake surrounded by woods. The almost static picture slowly transforms as the ice over the lake thaws and its murky waters turn into an abyss, the landscape surrounding it becoming a sort of exclusion zone created by a past or ongoing environmental, technogenic or eschatological disaster.

A particular depressing temporality and images at the limits of what is possible were the foundation of the group’s own style of narrative building and their subsequent departure from any narrative. Their increasingly realist 3D simulations take the viewer to the uncanny valley. The Lake builds on the tradition of metaphysical landscape painting, which conveyed the experience of a landscape as an ungraspable, mystical, and mysterious object, as well as a physical reality. An important aspect of the encounter with the world created by the artists is the viewer’s perception: from the physical response and the sense of scale to the feeling of helplessness before the mysterious irreversibility of a process beyond human control.

In 2008, the video won the Innovation Prize for Best Visual Artwork.