Perceptual thickness: An approach to algorithmic landscape from art theory

Abstract

This article proposes a philosophical articulation between Martin Heidegger’s ontology of art and Georg Simmel’s philosophy of landscape to reassess the aesthetic status of AI-generated landscape. In Heidegger, the artwork is the site where truth occurs as unconcealment. Such occurrence rests on a constitutive strife between world, the historical horizon of meaning that orients significance and, earth, the dimension of reserve that lends depthness to appearance. In Simmel, landscape emerges when cultural perception frames the infinitude of nature and configures it as a perceptual whole; landscape is both a form and a cultural operation of unification that preserves a remainder of multiplicity. The article’s central claim is that, in AI art, this dual structure of opening and reserve persists, yet it is displaced toward a dematerialized phenomenology.

To conclude this claim, the article introduces the category of perceptual depthness: a felt density that arises when world opens as cultural recognition and something simultaneously resists within perception. In traditional painting, resistance adheres to materiality (pigment, gesture, support). In algorithmic images, resistance takes the form of an illusion of naturalness that both offers itself and withdraws. The viewer recognizes inherited motives and grammars of landscape from art history, while sensing the loss of ground, the unmooring of a nature without belonging. Perceptual depthness thus ceases to rely on matter and concentrates in the friction between cultural memory and technical computation.

The case study of Quayola’s Landscape Paintings (2014–2017) substantiates this shift. The series builds on audiovisual captures and algorithmic procedures that synthesize color, light, and structure into images hovering between recognizability and abstraction. A world is opened through the evocation of the landscape tradition (atmospheric composition, horizons, chromatic rhythms) while depthness appears as a phenomenological remainder: overly perfect transitions, luminous tremors, regularities that induce estrangement. This remainder functions as earth in the Heideggerian sense, although no longer grounded in visible materiality. What comes to the fore is the truth of a technical mediation that founds experience: landscape persists as a category of truth, now translated into the algorithmic regime.

Accordingly, the article argues that AI landscape neither cancels nor repeats Heidegger’s and Simmel’s frameworks; rather, it relocates them. World and earth remain in strife, yet the depthness binding them becomes perceptual rather than material. The outcome is a poetics of recognition and loss: beauty arises when the memory of landscape confronts its own dematerialization and the viewer steadies themselves in the density of that interval.