Stefanie Loveday

Taking Mount Diablo’s geological formations and the designated “Trail through Time” as a starting point, I will create virtual artifacts as a speculative future for geological processes.

Remapping rock formations into digital constructs, the work will use VR as a tool for abstraction, looking at what is communicated in the process of translation from real to virtual. The geological forms will then be reinstantiated from virtual to physical by building a sculptural replica of the virtual artifacts. The surfaces of the original geology will be recorded and made into a sound recording, providing a sensorial interpretation of the geological artifact’s form.

The project will potentially result in a VR / AR environment and video installation incorporating sound and sculptural elements.

Stefanie Loveday uses abstraction and fragmentation as tools for re-imagining landscapes. Combining fictional geological artifacts with natural and built environments, she creates landscapes that fabricate a new geography composed of natural and constructed terrains. Her most recent work Landfall, Collapse was shot inside an open pit coal mine in the Ruhrgebiet area of Germany. In her work, she uses photography, video and sound to re-interpret the landscape around her, playing with notions of the fictional and concrete.
Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Stefanie Loveday received a Bachelors of Media Art at Emily Carr University and a MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She was the recipient of the Leon and Thea Koerner Award in the Fine and Performing Arts, and the Helen Pitt Award. Loveday has been awarded artist residencies through the Goethe Institute in Macedonia, Programa Red de Residencies Artísticas LOCAL in Colombia, and The Hammock Residency in Vancouver, Canada. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.