prosthetic knowledge

New Media - New Environments

This was my entry for the Transfer3D - Speed Show WROCŁAW, an experiment with Autodesk 1234D and a televised interview from 1967 with technology theorist Marshall McLuhan:

Brief:

Create a piece of work for the Transfer3D SPEED SHOW WROCŁAW, around the concept of 3D

Idea:

Advances in 3D imaging and technology has provided interesting possibilities to explore. In particular, there is a service which can convert multiple still digital photographs into a virtual 3D object called Autodesk 123D Catch.

With some understanding of the principles of how it works, it somehow lead me to connect to one of the most important figures in technological thought of the last 50 years: Marshall McLuhan. Having ideas with no single fixed viewpoint, employing ‘Probes’ to understand technological phenomena from various angles, and an influence from the texts of James Joyce and the concepts of Modernism, a connection can be made between both the thinker and the machine.

In 1967, he undertook a televised interview, sitting in a revolving chair in the centre of the stage, surrounded by an audience asking questions from all angles (see video embedded below):

Herbert Marshall McLuhan @ CBC 1967 from Sergey Teterin on Vimeo.

I took various frames from the footage to form the necessary collection to help create a potential model, all from various angles and different levels of proximity.

The results are a product of matching images and manually places points connecting the images to one another on particular key features of the person.

(See animated gifs above)

Result:

Admittedly, I was hoping to produce a virtual sculptural bust of Marshall Mcluhan, but the 1234D Catch service is designed for colour photography - the images I have used are black and white, grainy, and have been processed from original recording, to video, and eventually digitally processed onto online video services. Also, the subject must be completely still - it is difficult to find exact poses from various angles from someone who is in conversation with his audience throughout the recording.

Many of the attempts are, in relation to my initial plans, extremely disappointing in a representational sense, as well as some questionable orientations - upside down or positioned to the side as opposed to standing upright as would be expected.

My only consolation with the various outputs I have collected are that they still connect to the ideas of multiple viewpoints, abstract forms created from various points and time - machine vision generating pseudo-Cubism virtual sculptures.

The project should be considered a fully-finalized product, more of an experiment which, in theory, could provide other objects with continued practice, trying out different frames and combinations.

You can check some of the examples on my Autodesk 123D Catch profile here

‘Cybertheatre’ by Lev Nusberg (1967)

Russian avant-garde art installation featuring a stage of automaton polygon lifeforms. Taken from Faktografia’s essay post ‘The Art of Cybernetic Communism’:

In 1966-67 Dvizhenie planned a ‘Cybertheatre’ for Leningrad, an installation which would be populated with human-scale ‘cyber-creatures’, pulsating lights and concrete sounds, cascading pools of water and vaporous gases.

Visitors would follow paths through this strange environment, walking through the pools wearing protective clothing and avoiding plumes of steam and gas. All of this was to be programmed to respond to the passage of the visitor. The Cybertheatre presented its audience with a simulation of life on a strange planet (which its authors seemed to suggest might even be the Earth in some tragic future). Nusberg wrote It is of course an aesthetic fantasy, perhaps with prophetic overtones. Is not Man himself creating more and more of his environment on the planet Earth (using matter in the same way as a sculptor uses clay for his sculptures)?

I could not find any film footage of the piece, which would be fascinating to watch (although likely to underwhelm in reality by today’s standards).

You can read the whole essay here