Digitally manipulating the curvature of Earth, the photographs of Aydın Büyüktaş go beyond the limitations of human vision. Previously transforming a variety of locations in Turkey into dream-like multidimensional roller coasters with his Flatland project, Büyüktaş made a trip to the US at the end of last year to make Flatland II, featuring massive American landscapes without any visible horizons.Büyüktaş got his initial inspiration from Edwin Abbott's sci-fi novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The century-old story tells of a two-dimensional society who, after telling others about the existence of another dimension, is accused of being a heretic. "I was very impressed by the book written in 1884 exemplifying the difficulties in comprehending the way of interconnecting the dimensions and the inter-dimensional transition. The fact that the book tried to tell the inter-dimensional transition and the third dimension in second dimension corresponded to my inquiry about the third dimension," Büyüktaş says.
Advertisement
It took two months of meticulous planning, a month of aerial drone photography, and even more few months of compositing, to make a single photo. Büyüktaş stitches multiple photographs framed from different altitudes and angles to create his final images. Using a camera-equipped quadcopter, he flew, in total, about 10,000 miles, capturing American football and baseball fields, railroads in a desert, cow farms, and other scenes that extend the depths of vision with their simultaneously straight-on and aerial views. Büyüktaş describes his own mind-bending image series as a "multidimensional romantic point of view." Check out Flatland II below:
