True False Truly False Falsely True is a video and lecture-performance that focuses on the historical confluence of art and science, examining how both fields employed eyewitness techniques to portray nature with the utmost precision.
During the sixteenth century, artists and scientists aimed to capture nature faithfully through botanical drawings, landscapes, and still-life paintings. Meant to render reality as it was, these works often reveal a deeper tension between description and falsification, between authorship and objectivity, as artistic mimesis and scientific documentation began to take separate paths.
The performance, led by a character from the film As Far As The World Reaches, explores the theatrical nature of academic stages and livestream formats, revealing how the desired truthfulness of depictions can often be reduced to a set of artifices. For example, disputes over copyright and authorship of botanical images illustrate an inherent tension between the perceived objectivity of science and the personal input of the artist. By looking at crossovers between art and natural history, the work questions the role fabulation played in the creation of visual documents, specially those representing the so-called New World.
