Digital experiments

James McGrath’s digital works operate at the intersection of art history and contemporary data systems. By harnessing LIDAR scans of Australian forests, real-time environmental datasets, and cloth simulations mapped in architectural space, McGrath continues his interrogation of Baroque perspective—this time within the digital sublime. These works take his long-standing engagement with painted illusion and reinterpret it through generative computation and ecological datasets. Pieces such as Ghost Trees (2022), developed in collaboration with data sonification composer Gary Sinclair, transmute raw environmental data into haunting visual and sonic landscapes. LIDAR point clouds, extracted from endangered ecosystems, become spectral forests—resonant with ecological memory and loss. Here, McGrath visualises not just nature, but nature as remembered by machines: ephemeral, fractured, and eerily poetic​Ghost Trees\NFSA\Copy. Parallel to this, his experiments in cloth simulation—folds, veils, and cascading drapes—reframe Baroque theatricality as algorithmic form. These virtual textiles ripple with digital wind and light, collapsing the tactile with the illusory. Much like his earlier Cusp series, where flowers and drapery blur and engulf the viewer’s field of vision​CUSP 8 March-description, the digital folds hold and warp perspective itself, interrogating the planar screen as both portal and constraint. Together, these digital works form a vital extension of McGrath’s core practice: mapping the failures and seductions of perspective, whether Renaissance or rendered. His approach remains steadfastly baroque—not only in aesthetic, but in method: theatrical, layered, immersive, and never singular in meaning. As with his glass spheres and botanical terrariums, these digital works contain, distort, and reflect. They invite us to see, but also to question the machinery and histories behind seeing.