Terra Cascadia, PDX Airport Terminal Core

2024, Digital videos (Four at 7’30” each)

The new Terminal Core in the Portland International Airport features three artists on two 128-foot LED screens flanking each of the TSA portals. Terra Cascadia sweeps travelers through this region’s defining landscapes—glacier-topped volcanoes, lushly diverse forests, majestic waterfalls, and geologic wonders —then back to Portland via the carved canyons of the Columbia Gorge. For travelers who might only experience glimpses of these landscapes from their airline seats, the cascading scenes offer an immersion in the region’s natural beauty, and for many, a new experience of the splendors surrounding them.

These diverse landscapes are all rendered by extracting three-dimensional point cloud data from tens of thousands of photographs. The point clouds are animated by custom virtual cinematography tools developed by Thomas Wester, Ben Purdy and Holly Newlands. Through four videos—two for the north wall featuring the Washington side of the Gorge and two for the south wall featuring Oregon landscapes—these unique visualizations bring the Cascadian landscape to life at the awe-inspiring scale and resolution offered by the LED displays in celebration of the monumentality of this terrain while imparting a deep sense of place to travelers.