Pierre Casadebaig is a biologist and computer artist based in Toulouse, France.,He applies code and data-visualization methods developed for analyzing crop-environment interactions in his scientific work to an artistic practice, writing algorithms in the R programming language that turn real elevation datasets into vector drawings plotted onto paper.,,He has maintained this artistic practice since 2021, alongside his scientific research on plant ecology and sustainable cropping systems.
His first series, Dispyr, launched in 2022 and processes digital elevation data from the Pyrénées mountains into etching-like ink sketches.The approach has been compared to Matt Deslauriers's Meridian series.,A related body of work, Loess, simplifies the same elevation data into a few calligraphic lines drawn with a brush-tipped plotter, an aesthetic that has been likened to Chinese Shan Shui landscape painting.,In a 2022 release he collaborated with Anthony Siracusa, combining pen-plotted lines drawn from Alps elevation data with hand-drawn plant shapes added between the ridges.
In 2022 he presented a Dispyr work, Conflated Conflent, in “Arithmetic Phenomena”, an online group exhibition.In January 2023 he showed eight Pyrénées-based works from the Dispyr series in “Odysseys”, a group exhibition curated by the Verse platform at Cromwell Place in London.,In February 2024 he released Ridge Regression, a set of 128 digital and plotted works developed and curated with the Heft gallery and published as NFTs on Verse.,The series recombines a library of simplified landscape forms sampled from elevation data across South-West France into imagined mountains, drawing on the eighteenth-century landscape theories of Alexander Cozens and on the etchings of Hercules Segers and the woodblock prints of Hiroshige.
