The Digital Orca

No, you are not dreaming, the sculpture in front of you truly is pixelated. It’s called the “Digital Orca”, and was built next to the convention center in 2009. It is the work of Douglas Coupland, a Vancouver-born artist and author known for his postmodern novels. Made out of a steel frame covered with black and white aluminum cubes, it gives the illusion of a pixelated digital image. The renowned English magazine Architectural Design describes the orca as “beautiful and bizarre” at the same time. While Vogue sees it as a work that tackles the digital age of the 21st century, appropriating one of the region’s fiercest natural symbols, the Killer whale. The author, for his part, says he has taken a familiar West Coast symbol and turned it into something new. By using this natural spectacle, common along the coast, and modifying it with technology, he wanted to link the past to the future, as well as to speak of those who participated in Vancouver’s flourishing harbor activity, while addressing the important changes affecting British Columbia’s economy with the rise of the digital world.