Matt Scobel is a digital artist based in the Canadian Rockies who began his career in photography before moving into video, film and then 3D art.He reconstructs real-world landmarks from satellite, radar and LiDAR data for his This is Not a Photo series, composing virtual photographs from within the resulting 3D scenes.,He has also created meme artwork for The Memes by 6529.
Scobel started taking photography seriously in 2014, when he joined Canon to open an innovation lab in Waterloo, Canada, working with equipment from Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, GoPro and DJI.His first landscape photograph, First Exposure, was taken in Iceland in September 2016.Two years later he photographed Green Mile, a panorama of twelve images that he has called the largest image he has minted, after tracking down its location in the Canadian Rockies from clues shared in a Reddit thread.He minted a closed series of twelve landscape photographs as NFTs, closing it in 2019 with Closing Chapter, photographed at Moraine Lake, Canada.,
In 2021, while producing his first 3D animation, Eyes on Earth — a simulation of the more than 3,000 satellites orbiting and observing the planet, compressed into a 24-second day-night cycle — he began developing the idea for a series of virtual landscapes built from real-world data.,He quit his full-time job in 2022 to pursue the project, reconstructing sites from radar and satellite imagery, LiDAR scans and on-location photogrammetry, then placing a virtual camera inside the resulting scene to compose a photograph.The first work in the series, Haceta, was built from data gathered at the Heceta Head Lighthouse in Oregon in February 2022, with a genesis edition planned for release on SuperRare that September.,
In 2023 he released Memes in the Sky in the Meme Lab by 6529, a tribute to the collection's first season that displays all 47 of its works on pedestals above a virtual cityscape, animated over a simulated 24-hour cycle using real-world data from a location known as Null, at 0°N 0°E.In 2024 he released Past Freedoms, Future Pixels, a 3D render set in Sedona, in the same collection.In 2025 he released Ride the Wave as card #351 of The Memes by 6529.
