Internet project: virtual hotel and landscape
Modelled and rendered with various 3D software, web site with room reservation system, HTML, PHP, Flash and SQL programming solutions, 2000 ff.
Site redesign and re-programming for mobile and various screen sizes, 2020
Located at the Internet domain of www.vuedesalpes.com, the fictitious hotel Vue des Alpes, a mountain spa hotel from the 70ties, gives site visitors a chance to make an online reservation of one of the nine rooms for 5 days of virtual vacation. During his stay, the visitor has exclusive access to their room and to the landscape. They can explore the scenery and enjoy various amusements for room guests, e.g. a visit to the Gleissenhorn glacier region by funicular, or a pedal boat ride on the lake.
The work in progress Hotel Vue des Alpes, which has been enhanced in stages since 2000, is located in the midst of an idyllic Alpine scenery. All parts of the hotel and the digital landscape are constructed and put together with 3D software; there is no photographic material underlying the images. Rather than trying to aim at naturalist perfection, the fiction of the scenery and their appearance is targeting at the viewer's sense of recognition. They may ask themselves how the imitation of the typical pictoresque can set off such unobstructed memories of an atmospherical place, even if the digital fiction is not hidden at all.
This image of an Alpine region is formed by a large set of requisites which either are taken from the history of Swiss mountain landscape imagery, or spring from the authors' childhood memories of their holidays in the Alps. It acts as a pivot point for the pictorial walks on the net and for a group of loosely connected spatial installations, which deal with the relation between digital media and older techniques of imaging and representation.