The New Digital Reality: The Rise of Next-Generation 3D Renderings.

Visual Citizens is Shali Moodley and Adam Kelly, an interdisciplinary design studio with an appetite for surreal imagery and immersive visual experiences. The boundless medium of visualisation has allowed the duo to transcend the limitations of their origins in the architectural discipline. Their visualisations present an escape from the reality of practical design constraints, allowing them to render surreal environments and fill them with fantastical objects.

This collaboration between New York City-based art director Ben Willett, and co-directed and designed in collaboration with Barcelona-based Ezequiel Pini of Six N. Five, and Seattle-based photographer Cody Cobb explores digital vs natural materials and their immediate environments. See more here.

As someone who’s deeply in love with the analog arts and the dying skill of hand sketching, I never thought I’d be confessing that an emerging new cult of digital illustration and architectural renderings has me feeling giddy with excitement. I don’t mean your average CGI visuals — which, while serving an important purpose, usually pose as nothing more than the developer or real estate porn.

What I’m talking about is a new breed of digital artists who are adopting a less conventional, more painterly approach, evoking feelings of tactility and beautifully crafted atmospheres in the abstract scenes they create.

Perhaps the real reason we see the rise of these fantastic and surreal digital realities is our collective desire for visual escape through a new kind of immersive imagery, coupled with an insatiable appetite for what’s new and what’s next.

What all of these fictitious spaces have in common is their ability to cross multiple creative fields like conceptual thinking, art direction, illustration, interior design and even architecture. Much like any other form of analog art, today’s digital artists are legitimising CGI as a new medium for creative self-expression. Through imagination and impeccable design sensibilities, they are rendering a world that’s even more beautiful than our reality.

See more digital rendering projects on Yellowtrace here.

A selection of digital renderings by Alexis Christodoulou.

One such digital artist is Alexis Christodoulou, who became frustrated with the lack of modern aesthetics represented in the digital worlds since playing video games as a child. Based in Cape Town, Christodoulou turned to YouTube tutorials to learn the art of digital visualisations while working professionally as a copywriter. His visuals bridge the concept of indoor and outdoor spaces, often featuring tiled surfaces, shallows pools of water, geometric shapes and generous proportions tinted in pastel colours.

Having generated a cult following on Instagram, Christodoulou’s modern and clean aesthetic seems to have struck a universal chord.

A Lucid Dream in Pink, Sleep Cycle No 1-7 by Anders Brasch-Willumsen.

Over in Sweden, creative director Anders Brasch-Willumsen of Studio Brasch has been pursuing a personal project known as A Lucid Dream in Pink, Sleep Cycle No 1-7.

True to its name, Brasch-Willumsen’s evocative series captures the idea of a lucid dream – a particular state in which one is aware they’re dreaming, and can, therefore, control the narrative. His crisp and emotive images are some of my personal favourites created in the digital medium – they somehow manage to delicately bend the visions or reality, manifesting as utterly sublime fantasies.

A selection of digital renderings by Wang & Söderström.

Arguably one of the most established artists in this area are Copenhagen and Malmö based studio Wang & Söderström, led by spatial and furniture designer Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström. The practice creates “mind-tickling” moving and still images which maintain a high degree of lifelike tactility – an object or an idea that’s ostensibly well-known and recognisable from the real world can suddenly appear warped in their talented hands.

The pair’s ongoing Treasures series amalgamates imaginary materials and ambiguous shapes created onscreen that, through the use of cunning analogue perspectives, appear as highly stylised still life images. Their House Without Rules short film is a continuous vertical camera pan that travels through four floors of a building immune to the usual rules of gravity. Giant wobbly shapes varying in colours and textures satisfyingly squish and bounce around the rooms as tangible but hyperreal objects that make me wish I could reach into my computer screen just so I could touch them.

Creative agency Six N. Five’s dreamlike conceptual renderings showcase The Wait, Atelier Aveus’s furniture collection inspired by the philosophical themes of waiting. See more here.

[Image credits as noted.]