Plant Remains: Representing Disturbance through Digital Media

Harvard GSD

Plants die. But how often do we see dead plants in digital landscape representation? In the corners of renders and animations, vegetation from digital asset libraries—collections built into tools like V-Ray, Enscape, or Lumion—is typically rendered in a lush climax state. These 3D models operate as an aesthetic shorthand for lush, green, and idealized nature, sanitizing digital landscapes that are modeling futures shaped by collapse and scarcity. What is often missing, however, is the visual…