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Actual Objects’ aesthetic will be familiar to anyone fluent in the gaming world. They build their graphics in Unreal Engine, a platform that allows for photoreal rendering in real time, resulting in an effect that lives somewhere between the uncanny valley and a fever dream. “For us, it was about taking this aesthetic that maybe has a kind of bad taste in people's mouths, and see if we can do something compelling.” Unreal was developed in 1998 for computer game production, but subsequent advancements—atmospheric lighting and naturalistic motion tracking, for example—have expanded its range. It’s now used to create sets for visually rich series such as The Mandalorian and Westworld, very expensive television products whose broad appeal reaches beyond the usual science-fiction fandom. In Actual Objects’ hands, the effect is more Ed Atkins than Call of Duty. “We decided to lean into the stylization that comes with the engine, rather than fight against it,” Farin said.

Their client roster is an unlikely split between pop and indie music and mass-market and avant strains of contemporary fashion. They’ve created unexpectedly moody campaigns for Nike and The North Face, but also Ottolinger, the Berlin label that delights in deconstructing its garments to near-destruction, a neat echo of Actual Objects’ scorched-earth aesthetic. They produced imagery for Hood By Air’s archive reinterpretation project, Museum, as well as the deeply unsettling video for Leech, Shayne Oliver’s noise-music project, in which a deep fake version of Oliver mutates into nightmarish creatures. Their biggest incursion into the fashion world is their ongoing work with Marine Serre, whose own apocalypse-addled futurism feels neatly in tune. As an accompaniment to Serre’s FW19 collection “Radiation”—full-coverage bodysuits and elongated dusters with matching ventilator masks—Actual Objects animated models walking through an irradiated Paris slowly returning to nature, a visual tone poem that begins bleakly in darkness and ends in resplendent sunshine. “It's not a fetishization of the end of the world,” Cochran said, speaking of Serre’s work, but just as easily could have been describing their own. “It's: What does it look like to adjust?”

Cochran, Farin, and Vernet all grew up in Los Angeles, but came together from different disciplines. Cochran studied painting, but, graduating during the 2008 recession, felt shut out from institutional jobs, and instead choose to teach. Vernet bounced around the periphery of the music industry, interning for FADER and managing small electronic acts, including, for a time when they were 17, Farin, who had what Cochran calls "a relatively fruitful career as an underground electronic music artist" while he was at school in New York.

As a kid, Farin was into gaming and obsessed with technology, and felt architecture was a prudent real-world application of both. He came to New York to study at The Cooper Union, which is where he realized it wasn’t. “The focus was on drawing, and I felt there was more that could be done in the field,” he said. “There wasn't a lot of attention paid to this entire digital ecosystem.” He moved back to L.A. to attend graduate school at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where he studied under the Australian film director and futurist Liam Young, whose conception of architecture beyond a siloed idea of simply designing buildings convinced Farin he could use digital graphics to express a more total worldview, a belief that forms the thrust of Actual Objects’ working thesis.

They’re very aware of the capacity for misuse. As the technology becomes more common, they feel a kind of ethical obligation to meet it at the level of larger corporations, an element of resistance to what the software was originally intended for. “I don't think we want the aesthetics of the future to be set by Star Wars,” Farin said. “There’s the idea that these technologies are built and often owned by, like, Facebook. And so it's a question of how can you responsibly use this technology to not just serve the agenda of those who made it?”

There’s the temptation to view simulated graphics as the future of fashion, or at least as an attractive answer to producing fashion campaigns during a pandemic (Balenciaga recently released its FW21 collection via video game), an impulse Actual Objects resists. “A lot of studios say yes,” Farin said. “It's the advantageous thing for us to say yes—we'd make a lot more money—but we said no.” “Fashion is the one artform that can never be purely digital,” Cochran added. “It's a physical thing that goes on our bodies. The way we see it is: CGI isn't the future of fashion, but it's another tool of art making.”

The application of simulated graphics in a fashion context presents a fascinating if perhaps inadvertent commentary on fashion imagery’s smoothing gloss, one of the industry’s chief exports. In Actual Objects’ hands, that gloss is exaggerated to a nearly horrific degree. For Ottolinger’s SS21 collection, they engulfed models in columns of smoke, or interrupted their faces into glitchy static, or distended their features to grotesque proportions.

Questions about authenticity, representation, and what counts as real have seldom been more acute, in fashion and outside of it. Those questions converge neatly in Lil Miquela, an entirely fictional, digitally rendered influencer that emerged on Instagram in 2016. Since then, Lil Miquela has figured in real-world marketing campaigns and editorial spreads, to varying effect. Last year, in a campaign for Calvin Klein, she was depicted making out with Bella Hadid, a choice the brand later apologized for. The focus remains centered on the ethical and commercial implications of CGI models (there are others), but as a critique of how we construct our identities online, Lil Miquela would seem no less real than Hadid herself, and perhaps more honest. Earlier this year, Actual Objects created the video to one of Miquela’s singles (it’s a canny detail that Miquela’s creators equipped her with the same anodyne pop music career as celebrities looking for creative legitimacy), as slick and convincing as anything being produced for “real” singers today. “Digital avatars are going to be a part of what the future looks like,” Farin said. “They look like us, they kind of move like us, perhaps there's a way to see ourselves in them.” The dissonance allows for an element of distance. Actual Objects operates in this register not because the imagery is harder to parse, but because it is in many ways easier. “Where the CGI comes in is it's a novel thing that gives people maybe a moment of pause,” Cochran offered. “To say, wait, something's off here, let me investigate this a bit more.”

The name ‘Actual Objects’ sounds coy, a wink at the idea that they produce completely intangible nonobjects, but it actually couches an activist appeal. All their work aims to internalize the urgency of climate change, and the very real relationship between our increasingly online lifestyles and the built environment; there are a lot of fires in their work not because fires look cool, but because much of the country is literally on fire.

One of Farin and Cochran’s early collaborations was an unreleased video game that tracked the lifespan of computer hardware, from metal mines in Russia to factories in Shenzhen to e-waste dumps in Ghana and Bangladesh. “People traditionally understand technology as this bottomless thing, the cloud or the silver sheen of Apple products,” Farin said. “But even a Word document is something that's legitimately physical—it's an etching on a piece of metal on a hard drive, or if you upload files to Google Drive, that’s not actually the air in the atmosphere, that's a data center in North Dakota, so with every file you add you’re increasing waste and space.” They’re interested in the conservationist idea of rewilding, but instead of reintroducing lost animal species to nature or undoing domestication, they want to shift the conception of nature and cities, long thought of as antagonists, to a more harmonious codependency, wherein a city is considered as natural as forest, and society allocates as much care to the latter as it’s accustomed to doing for the former. In this arrangement of course, the lost species—the one needing reacclimation to its new world—is us.

Max Lakin is a journalist in New York City. His writing has also appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, GARAGE, The New Yorker, and more.