How do cameras see? This is what Troika set out to understand; to bring computer vision back to painting, to try to internalize the machine way of seeing, its brute logic of dissecting the field of view in millions of tiny pixels, and the range of colors it perceives.

Troika’s paintings are deconstructed into pixels of 16 shades of Red, Green and Blue, reconstituting the way that networked cameras, CCTV, aerial drones and all digital cameras see and record the world: in raw format, in digital RGB. They depict publicly accessible webcam imagery of extreme natural weather conditions and events as a technique for visualizing the world with the detached, indifferent and disengaged eye of CCTV or ‘webcam vision’.

For “Forest Filled with Pines and Electronics”, the artists came across webcam footage of the Californian Dixie Fire in 2021 engulfing a forest camera that was placed there originally by the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and that was now falling victim to its own creation when flames were chewing first through the trees then submerging the camera in the wildfire’s flames.