Category: LookingOutwards

Sophie Calle — The Address Book

Calle finds an address book on the ground, belonging to a certain “Pierre D.” She photocopies the book before returning it anonymously, and then goes around tracking down the names in this book, interviewing any who will respond to find out more about the owner. Chaos ensues, etc… I personally really enjoy the perversion of this project and how naturally it meshes with the rest of Sophie Calle’s “spying,” body of work.

The Inflatable Crowd Company

Maybe a bit of a stretch to call this temporal capture or portraiture, but in my defense they are creating temporal “portraits” of non-real people to be captured in the background of a cinematic event. Also I just really wanted to include them because they’re so weird and I think cheap movie-trickery can be really beautiful as fine arts. Company that creates inflatable dolls to fill the background of crowd scenes in movies for a price cheaper than creating the same effect with CGI.

A little Rippley’s video on it: https://youtu.be/66PIr7Z2QZ8?feature=shared

Jenny Holzer — Cursed (? There are a few different ways it’s being titled online and I did not take a picture of the info-plaque-thing when I saw it)

Lead and copper plates with tweets stamped into them. Kind of a portrait of the president’s digital footprint made permanent. I’m not the biggest fan of the very on-the-nose choice of subject, but I understand the decision and think it does it well. Big shocker to anyone who’s taken at least one class with me — I’m a big fan of poetics and the temporal digital made permanent physical.

This project by Michael Sedbon created two artificial ecosystems of photosynthetic bacteria competing for light to explore the emergent behavior of technologies as life forms. I found this concept particularly interesting because I’m currently taking a class related to modeling cognitive and neurobiological systems of adaptive decision making, which shares some similarities with this concept in certain ways.

https://www.creativeapplications.net/arduino/cmd-experiment-in-bio-algorithmic-politics/

This project by Christian Mio Loclair is driven by a custom GAN solution called RayGan, which learns possible human poses through 120,000 postures of human bodies without understanding motion sequences. Visual elements like textures and colors are also generated through a separate GAN trained on a curated dataset from visual artists. I found the visualization of these human poses intriguing.

https://www.creativeapplications.net/openframeworks/blackberry-winter/

This project created by the Amana Prototyping Lab transformed basic rhythmic gymnastics ribbon movements into algorithms to create a systematized performance simulated in a 3D virtual environment and executed by the robot arm. The goal was to represent the sensibility of human movement using harsh robot mechanics, which is a concept I found quite interesting as it experimented with the contrast between fluid human motion and the rigid nature of robots.

https://www.creativeapplications.net/openframeworks/rhythmic-gymnastics-denso-robotic-arm-and-the-sensibility-of-human-movement/

First, Littered MVMNTS [https://www.instagram.com/litteredmvmnts/]: kind of an inverse portraiture of a human mimicking the motion of trash through choreographed movements. I like how the artist is using his art to bring attention to an environmental issue (and utilizing instagram/tik tok platforms to do so, e.g. he selects 15 second snippets), the choices of costume, and that–in line with his message–he picks up the trash when he’s done.

Next are these silver gelatin photographic prints of religious statues defaced by Khmer Rouge looters between 1975-1979 developed by Zhi Wei Hiu (and captured by Zhi’s uncle). Zhi developed these images, which were stored for 30-40 years in non-archival conditions (the photos themselves were taken by his uncle), resulting in signs of fungal growth on the negatives. Zhi further coats the surface of the paper with zinc oxide, an abrasive which captures the motion of a silver stylus across the paper. I thought this was an interesting example of “temporal capture” because the photographic duplicates of the real objects, left to the devices of nature and time, also capture the decay of the captured object.

In this photo Zhi is demonstrating how they want the photo to be displayed for an upcoming exhibition

Finally, Pipilotti Rist’s Open My Glade (Flatten), which shows a video projection of her seemingly pressed against a glass surface, moving side to side, on the large windows at the New Museum’s entrance. This work appeals to me as an example of portraiture because it’s kind of grotesque (and with some scale) while being in a genre and exhibition setting that usually aims for flawlessness. I also like the paradoxes in this image–how we are both given and denied a sense of corporality and how the display medium is suggested by the media (window), but is not the one that caused the effect (pressed against glass).

MagiScan is an AI-driven 3D scanning app that easily captures real-world objects and turns them into 3D models with various format choices. You can even transfer models into NVIDIA Omniverse or Minecraft block structures. It provides a fast and affordable way to create 3D models of real-life objects, utilizing AR and LiDAR technology to quickly create 3D schematic floor plans in both metric and imperial units. The LiDAR tech can capture entire spaces and surroundings up to 5 meters away. You’re essentially capturing something in the physical world and turning it into a new possibility. While the 3D scans are wildly impressive and detailed for a phone app scanner, it took 7 hours to process on the free version, and unfortunately, you’d need to pay a subscription to continue using the app (3 Free Scans).

Image: Various 3D Scans

Link: https://magiscan.app/