OVERVIEW

        3d models captured by scanning spaces with phone based photogrammetry. I am interested in exploring what an algorithm decides is important without understanding what it sees. I scanned places like Walmart, Home Depot, churches, and peoples houses. The results look like natural organic forms on both the macro and micro. Seen from the outside, some look like hulking organic monoliths, some resemble images from an electron microscope, some have root or capillary like structures. Some turn out like excavations into an ancient ruin. I play up this tendency in some of the models heavily. It amuses me to think of an intelligent program from an unrecognizable future digging through these ancient primitive scans like an archaeologist. I modify the rendering, surface texture and lighting of scans, but never touch the geometry.

       I encourage mistakes during the scanning process because the errors are the most interesting. Some examples of happy mistakes were when it created a second, partial, phantom floor in a waiting room as if two waiting rooms from different dimensions fused together as they crossed paths. Another was a pocket universe in a friends living room which contained a second Christmas tree. It also had the tendency to render mirrors as other spaces. I have spent countless hours navigating my own scans as if exploring alien worlds.

Explore the models for yourself on my sketchfab page

OVERVIEW

        The same process as Sweet Space only focused more on the people. A 3x3 grid of 9 images was displayed at the UMass gallery opening, but I've included some additional images. with titles Sweet Face 1-3, Home Bodies 1-3, and Ornamental Man 1-3. Various scales and distortions are explored in these series including the complete replacement of one figures photo texture with one of the modified "Texture Maps" in the series below. The Sweet Face Images are presented next to a flat layout of their texture file like a fingerprint. The Home Body images are people blending with their environments as if part of a single organism. The Ornamental Man images are a modified texture map from a different scan wrapped over the geometry of a person.

OVERVIEW

        Prints and video, these are also taken from the 3d scanning process. They are made with the texture file generated by the program. It shows all the photographic information from the scan in a flat, segmented way. It is random because of the order in which I scan the area and the particular lighting conditions. Certain pieces capture more clearly and quicker than others. The software fits the random pieces into a semi grid like arrangement, though due to their widely varying size and shape, the grid is not very strict. It is an amusing coincidence that some of these texture maps end up resembling actual maps after I process them. It makes me think of “Stochastic Similarity” and wonder how much of it is coincidental and how much it is due to the fact that everything under the sun is abiding by the same laws of physics. This also applies to the 3d models from “Sweet Space”

Most of the processing I did to these  texture maps falls loosely under the category of “Weak A.I.” such as Topaz Gigapixel A.I., Premier’s Optical flow, and Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill. These programs were used to do things like intelligently upres the images and fill in gaps of the original texture files. A future series I might like to do would be documenting all the steps of the process and displaying them together or creating an animation.