Experimental Capture • Fall 2022
CMU College of Fine Arts • Profs. Golan Levin & Nica Ross
My exploration with Near-Infrared photography: I will go through the portraits I captured, my attempts to color these black and white images, and some of my video footage towards a narrative.
Near-Infrared Photographs
Coloring the Near Infrared images:
digital negative
8×10 test print
15×11 print
Narratives:
cuts from footage:
This project explores individuals in time through slit-scan.
Slit Scan–> I am fascinated by the possibilities of distorting the body, time, and space.
Slit Scan Archive: http://www.flong.com/archive/texts/lists/slit_scan/index.html
Alvaro Cassinelli & Masatoshi Ishikawa
“Alvaro & Ishikawa‘s Khronos Projector is a multi-faceted project exploring space-time representations from video. One manifestation is an interactive spatial browser for time-lapse sequences. Time-lapse photographic sequences are formed by taking a snapshot every minute, hour or day from a fixed camera shooting at a natural or artificial landscape. A ‘Time-Punch’ brings the night as a dark eye in the middle of the sky. More simply (and classically), a Spatio-temporal gradient can be formed on the image by selecting a plane temporal filter.”
Gradient Map:
Final Product (original footage from past work):
Displacement Map:
Final Video:
Derek Burnett, “In the Spirit of Things” , Kansas album cover (1988)I am fascinated by how veins can be captured through near-infrared/ color infrared imaging.
As for Person in Time, I wonder how changing the blood temperature might change the color of the veins, and how that will show in photographs.
As for the subject, I am thinking about self-portraits. 
My typology machine leans more towards “experimentality” rather than “laboratoriality”, since my opening cut is not often archived to be traced and involves many failed attempts.
I resonate with the concept of “two cuts”: when making the typology machine, I found myself designing the machine by determining a set of working procedures; learning the tool, getting better at it and deciding which steps and parts to keep and leave out; and finally, generating knowledge/ product from it.
I also agree that when planning and designing my typology machine, the complex indeterminate relationship between the opening and closing cuts gives space to the possibility of creating.
In short, my typology machine generates portraits for two in a virtual environment inside a polaroid photo.
This project was inspired by one of my experimentations with Polaroid Lab: I printed a virtual scene I made in Unity. It turns out to look so real in the frame of polaroids.
It makes me think about how we sometimes just take for granted that what’s in polaroid is real. And, what does “real” mean in the virtual world?
All these questions brought me to the concept of the uncanny valley:
I want to explore: how we decide if a scene is “real”, what that “realness” means to us, and, what we feel from this realness.
Thus, my typology machine generates portraits for two in a virtual environment inside a polaroid photo.
Here’s how my typology machine work:
What was much more complex than I thought was importing the motion and postures from Mixamo to Unity. Those files cannot be directly imported into Unity and need to be processed. And this is where I really got stuck.
Therefore, I changed my plan: Instead of trying to generate motion and postures through Mixamo, I asked my friends to be in specific postures when I scan them using photogrammetry. Also, I switched from capturing full shots to close-ups.
What was easier is that the baked lights in Unity helped a lot to blend the characters into the virtual scenes.
Evaluating my project, I am satisfied that I did feel things from the polaroids: a sense of strangeness, eerieness, detachment, or simply the feeling that something is going wrong.
As for future opportunities, I really want to create virtual avatars of myself in mass: to capture different versions of myself, then put them together and make them meet and interact with each other in my virtual space. Moreover, when working on this typology machine, I kept thinking about where exactly my subjects–these virtual avatars– exist: in polaroids, in virtual worlds, in a vacuum, or nowhere. Thus, I want to explore the existence of the virtual self in loops. For example, I will make a polaroid. In the polaroid, there is my virtual avatar holding a virtual polaroid, and in that virtual polaroid is another portrait of my virtual avatar.
More Detailed Polaroids:
Click here to see the Complete Collection of Polaroid Real+
🫶🏻 Special thanks to: Nica for the amazing inspiration! Golan, Vincent, Cassie, and my discussion groups for the guidance and assistance throughout.
Idea 1:
Typologies: photogrammetry of reality printed on Polaroids
This project wants to: explore the role of the polaroid in current time; explore the boundary between “real” and “virtual”.
To do this, I want to capture photogrammetric versions of realistic ones; select and print polaroids of the photogrammetric scenes/objects. Stick a collection of polaroids onto the real object.
Why Polaroids? it’s something physical, looks “real”
I’m also thinking about making Polaroid emulsion lifts: I like the quality and the texture of this material, but I’m still thinking about how to fit this into my project.
The object I scanned was a Polaroid. I worried that the resulting images would be repetitive, but they turned out to be surprising.
The sputter coating on polaroid surface:
Edges of layers inside polaroid: 
The silver grains coated on the film base:
At the magnitude of nanometers, the slight vibrations of the particles caused by sounds and shakes can be observed.
I was fascinated by how SEM captures the photos: it continuously captures a relatively long period. I like to think about how one single photo generated by SEM becomes a representation of a piece of music/ a conversation/ a series of actions.
Slight vibrations when a conversation was going on:
Vibrations when playing a piece of rock music:
Vibrations when knocking on the table：
I struggled to follow the emulsion, exposure methods, and chemicals mentioned in the first half of the reading. However, I like the comparison this reading made between Raman spectrograms and photogrammetry. Both of them use photography to measure. While the Raman images generate very specific information, photogrammetric images contain mathematical information and visuals. I also like the article’s mention of Documentation vs. Measurement: while most photogrammetric images are discarded once the mathematical information is harvested, the few images with accidental pictorial details are preserved.
I was also inspired by how this reading looks at the slow-down effects of photography: motion can be recombined as a moving image, but the trend was to see motions as a series of individual discrete moments strung together.
As for an artistic opportunity, I lately tried a Polaroid emulsion lift, and I was thrilled about the texture of possibilities of it. I want to explore the relationship between emulsions and images, though I am unsure if this is a methodological/scientific/scientistic approach to imaging. To be more specific, I am thinking about printing images that would be otherwise impossible to appear on Polaroid films (such as my drawing, a screenshot of my computer, an image of a scene created with Unity, etc.)— and then extracting the emulsion and transferring it onto surfaces other than films or papers. I appreciate the soft texture and the uncontrollable nature of emulsions: they blur the restriction of the rectangular frame and create unexpected patterns by overlapping themselves. I’m also excited about transferring the emulsions onto different surfaces: I wonder what it could possibly mean through transferring images with certain content onto wood, iron, cotton, or other special mediums.
06.01.2020 18.39 (2022). Video projection, sound and fans
This is an installation by Alfredo Jaar exhibited at the Whitney Biennial 2022. This piece consists of video footage from June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, DC following the murder of George Floyd.
In this installation, the video part shows scenes of police in riot gear using flash grenades and tear gas on crowds of protesters in an effort to disperse them, and a police helicopter is brought in to make them further scatter.
In one key moment, the helicopter flies incredibly low, threatening the crowd. The fans and the sound in this installation simulates the sounds and movement of the helicopter. The fans spin incredibly fast, with the loud sound simulating the engine, this piece situations the audience into the threatening environment. This work brings in discussion of social justice, violence, and surveillance.
I found this work inspiring and relevant to this class because it records, captures, and displays the event in a way that challenges the viewers to physically engage with video works.
Links:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/alfredo-jaar-whitney-biennial-2022-2093016
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/04/25/2022-whitney-biennial-video-artists