David Lisser is a UK-based artist who uses 3D scanning tools to explore how digital interfaces simulate the natural world and how computer vision can lead to new interpretations of what we see. His practice, which he calls a kind of future-archaeology, spans sculptures, digital renders and short videos that draw on the still life and vanitas tradition to imagine artefacts from a future built around cultured meat and biotechnology.
His Surface Tension works 3D-scan flowers and trees and run the resulting point clouds through a custom fluid-simulation script that causes them to dissolve and drift apart, a reflection on permanence and decay in a digital world. As a resident at Watershed's Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, Lisser made sculptures and installations exploring hopes and fears for the future, including Meal Plans, a research-led project imagining the future of food as if it were history, and a mobile seed-bank. Between 2016 and 2019 he presented solo exhibitions and residencies including “The CleanMeat Revolution” at Watershed and Wethecurious in Bristol and “Future Thinking” at Reading University and the Museum of English Rural Life. In 2023 his work appeared in group exhibitions including “Digital Paradise” in Sanya, China, and “Crypto-social Aesthetics” at JPG Gallery in Paris. In 2024 his 3D scan point-cloud piece The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing, part of Electric Artefacts' group exhibition “SCREENSAVERS”, depicted a laptop nestled among bedsheets, its scanned points gradually drawn toward the screen's glow until only one remained.
