Troika’s work probes the uneasy overlap between past and present, tracing how human activity reshapes landscapes both real and imagined. Their practice draws on indigenous plants, extinct species, and traces of pre-industrial cultures to explore what endures beneath technological progress. Echoing nineteenth-century quests for new territories and the mapping of unfamiliar landscapes, the work reflects on loss, of ecologies, of knowledge, of rootedness, while acknowledging that much of what we now inhabit is already an artificial terrain. The idea of Deception Island becomes a metaphor: a landscape that appears solid but conceals something submerged, manufactured, or erased.

At the same time, Troika situates these histories within a hyper-digital present, using sourced materials and techniques alongside algorithmic image generation and digital fabrication. They create fictional yet recognisable territories where 3D-printed plants, digitally manipulated vistas, and extinct species coexist. Their environments reflect the constructed realities we already occupy, prompting questions about what counts as life, survival, and memory in an age of substitution. The result is a world where the supports, structures, and scaffolds of existence, both biological and technological, are made visible and open to scrutiny.

The seemingly familiar landscapes and plants in Troika’s work conceal a deeper strangeness, hinting at worlds that are imagined, constructed, and yet eerily possible. Our realities are no longer fixed by what we see in front of us; we are confronted with AI-generated imagery almost every day. This is however, not a new phenomenon, the very idea of creating a vista or an idealised landscape has existed for centuries. In the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution rapidly transformed much of Europe from agrarian to industrial economies, artists were driven by a desire to capture this moment of change. While much discussion centres on Paris and modernity, particularly in relation to Impressionism, there remained a strong impulse to paint and depict the evolving landscape.  In Turner’s painting, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844) this approach is exemplified. Turner absorbed modernity into a poetic, idealised vision rather than depicting it literally. Although the railway symbolised rapid industrial change, Turner blurs the locomotive into rain, light, and atmosphere, making it feel like a natural force rather than a mechanical intrusion. The surrounding countryside, river, and even a small hare in the foreground suggest continuity with older ways of life rather than disruption. By dissolving the boundaries between technology and nature, Turner transforms the steam engine into something sublime and timeless. His image captures a specific historical moment while maintaining older values of what constitutes a real English landscape.  Similarly, contemporary imagery can retain this idealised quality. In Out of Place, Out of Time, Troika’s fabricated landscape is deliberately deceptive: the hazy scene contains species of plants now extinct, products of industrialisation and ecological destruction. While it is important to question the authenticity of the image, the plants and trees forge a tangible landscape that embodies a sense of realness.

This notion of authenticity remains a persistent question, as does the instability of terrains that are often similar yet somehow connected to an allegory of nature. In Ultraflora, Troika presents the plausible possibility that these plants can sustain themselves by rapidly growing in an artificial environment. The plant species have been transformed and re-purposed into metal forms that serve as prototypes for a new type of plant life. Algorithmic programming from the computer constrains their growth along specific paths; this is not a natural biological process but an artificial construction. The plants stand as a testament to the technology that allows their fabrication, 3D printing, and to the artificial support structures that sustain them. As unsettling as this vision of growing plants may seem, it echoes human intervention in contemporary food production, where crops are cultivated in carefully controlled ecosystems with a precise balance of nutrients, water, and sunlight. This mirrors an artificial reality that departs radically from traditional horticultural principles, revealing humanity’s relentless drive to adapt, manipulate, and assert control over the natural world, shaping both ecosystems and their representations to serve our needs and ambitions.

 

Furthermore, in an age where images are produced instantly through smartphones, then enhanced with filters or AI, rapid circulation often diminishes our impulse to question authenticity. Yet Troika’s images deliberately resist this superficiality. They are meticulously produced using paleobotanical methods, including scans of extinct plants, and composed from a series of images that coalesce into a carefully constructed landscape. This practice foregrounds both the production and circulation of images, inviting reflection on how society engages with visual material under late capitalism. Hito Steyerl’s concept of the “poor image” illuminates a parallel concern, low-resolution, widely circulated digital files reveal how power, access, and technology shape visual culture. Unlike Steyerl’s poor images, Troika’s work is produced using high-resolution technology and materially realised, yet it still participates in a similar visual economy. Its value lies not merely in authenticity but in the negotiation between creation, circulation, and perception. Walter Benjamin’s argument in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction hinges on the premise that that an artwork loses its traditional “aura”, its unique presence and authority tied to time and place, and instead derives significance from its ability to circulate and be experienced by many. Troika’s digitally mediated yet materialised landscapes therefore highlight how contemporary image-making navigates both technological and aesthetic realities, producing work that is at once authentic, artificial, and somewhat familiar. 

Deception Island interrogates the tension between authenticity and artifice, reflecting on the ontological processes that shape our environments. It bridges a pre-industrial past, where nature followed its own rhythms, with our hyper-digital present, defined by technology, rapid image circulation, and human intervention. The island, simultaneously uncanny and familiar, serves as an allegory for our contemporary condition, the fabricated landscapes and extinct plant species provoke reflection on what is real, what is constructed, and how meaning persists in a world where appearances can be deceptive. In this way, it confronts us like Radiohead’s song Fake Plastic Trees, a haunting meditation on the emptiness behind appearances. The song’s plastic trees, beautiful, convincing, and seemingly natural, reveal themselves upon closer inspection to be hollow and artificial, serving as a metaphor for human façades, consumer culture, and the illusions we construct.

¹ Clark, T. J. The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. Princeton University Press, 1984.

² Corbett, P., Holt, Y. & Russell, F. eds. The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

³ Steyerl, H. In Defense of the Poor Image, e-flux no. 10, 2009. 

⁴ Benjamin, W. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936

Deception Island,
max goelitz, Munich 
24 Sept — 12 Nov 2025

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