dove

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Award Recipient

• Basically Good Media Lab Student Research Award for New Media and Sound Arts
• The President’s Media Awards for Excellence – Best in Installation

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(photogrammetry, 3D print, DTF heat transfer, nylon, 3D animation)

dove is the accumulation of a year. A year of magic, disenchantment, re-orientation, and study, both personally and in my work. dove traces the entire path of my 3D scanning practice and theory alongside it, entangled with my personal experiences and grief along the way.

Photogrammetry-based 3D scanning is a process with which multiple photos from different angles are interpolated together to re-create a 3D model of an object or scene. There are several techniques that can be used, but in my practice I shoot video from my phone camera, and pull stills from the video to get my images. While this results in a somewhat lower quality scan than HD photos, it is much more convenient for scanning on the go, out in the field where things may catch my eye.

(images are shown here as white dots. The intersections of point-features
within the camera halo create the scan. dove is scanned from 609 images)

At the end of last year, I was still working with some hope of an iconographic aesthetic that could be created through 3D scanning. I took many scans over the summer as a photographic practice, hoping for “one good picture” out of the heap, one that stood on its own without too much artifice or contrivance. A dead pigeon, wings held up in a rigor mortis surrender proved to be the one. As August turned to September, several grievous misfortunes occurred to me, and I started the year in an intense depression, from which I had no recourse but to turn inward and distract myself with intense thought and focus on my practice.

I had this scan that I recognized held some pathos, but the question was how to present it properly. Throughout third year I worked in virtual reality, thinking this was the proper staging ground for these new images. But as I studied photoconceptualist theory I moved towards more “conventional” imagework; projections, prints, video. Finally in my last piece I addressed the missing portion of my 3D scanning praxis; that of the sculptural.

I believe good art can keep secrets. And while some abstractive methods can be contrived, each abstraction in dove comes from simple transformations, following the logic of photogrammetry itself; the origami nature of the models produced, the illusion of the whole created by several cameras’ finite data, and the mortifying nature of the photogrammetric process— that nothing in motion, nothing alive, can be scanned, and anything scanned becomes a corpse. These elements, in combination with a year of material experimentation, came to form the image of dove.

dove is a poem about futility, the futility of any technology of capture. Following Callois, a poem about butterflies as camera, forming the halo swarm of the photogrammetric camera coordinates. Even as it escapes the screen to be 3D printed, the futility of translation, the futility of physically applying a texture map, acts taken for granted by the machinic vision systems we become increasingly tied to. A poem at last about things lost and irretrievable.

🤍 exhibited in room D1357 alongside Alisa Tarabrina and Mac Burgess 🤍