In Vicious Venue, a sculpture inspired by 8-bit artwork, vultures pick over a dead typewriter.
Photo: Shawn Smith

What happens if your childhood experience of nature has been solely through videogames? 3-D, 8-bit-inspired sculptures, that’s what.

In an interview with Wired.co.uk, Smith explains how his sculptures provide a means of exploring the otherwise unknown natural world, as “pixels became a sort of map from which to experience.”

Smith says: “I have been around the depiction of objects and nature on screens all my life and I found myself wondering what these things look like in three dimensions. I didn’t want to just re-create something I had seen in a videogame. I started to become more interested in what I had learned throughout my life from computers that I hadn’t experienced firsthand.”

Although born in the year of Pong, 1972, and initially inspired by the game Pitfall, Smith chooses the animals he creates for a number of reasons. “I like to play around with imparting ‘real’ world characteristics of one animal onto its digital counterpart.”

The project Vicious Venue, pictured above, was the result of “asking myself what a digital vulture would eat if it was somehow trapped in reality,” he says.

As for how these artworks are constructed, Smith’s process is meticulous. After hand-drawing architectural-style designs for the front, top and side views, Smith then cuts each individual piece that he uses by hand, before coloring each “pixel” by hand in a mix of ink and acrylic paint. He then glues the pieces together one at a time. Bearing this process in mind, it’s just as well that it’s 8-bit images Smith chooses to re-create.