T4T
LAB
OBJECT OBSCURATION
Invited Distinguished Professor:
Adam Fure.
Gabriel Esquivel, Studio Professor
Stephen Caffey, Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture History and Theory Texas A&M University
Team: Justin Zumel, Eline Verhoeven, Tung Dinh, Maria Fuentes.
Within the realm of representation, a resolution occurs during the transition between mediums: creating the possibility of emulating new objects.
In our process of photogrammetry, we rediscovered the idea of flattening. Through this process of using the camera as a marker between physical to digital, there is a loss of information that creates formal and textural discrepancies. For the methodology, reproducing these objects in the digital form can be controlled through the amount of photos used. For example, less photos equate more data loss and tears within the mesh, while more photos create higher dense polymesh digitally.
The categories of objects in our mereology consisted of: physical natural rock, Physical synthetic rock, and rock-like object. Through that process, these object’s unequivocal qualities dissolved into the same field to a point of obscured qualities between the three categories. Another production from this method was an image that represents the object through texture; which creates a flattened representation of the object as if the object were a flat image.
Through this exploration of controlled resolution of meshes, we then created an object digitally that would be added to this array of meshcount. We noticed that if we widened this spectrum of density from high poly to low poly meshes, then the low poly meshes will turn into flat planes or faces. Through these flat planes, they do not represent the rocks, but the idea of flattening. Again, this idea of flattening is not only a production of the photogrammetry, but also a production between the pure digital, pure physical, and translation between the physical to digital.
These planes and objects were then mapped with textures that did not emanate from the objects themselves, but other objects. For example, the texture map that was created for one object was mapped onto another object to form another degree of obscuration; the delineation from what the object was to what the object manifested itself through digital manipulations. To exhaust the idea of obscuration even further, our collective of textures did not only come from the photogrammetry, but also photographed textures of found objects. Through the post processing phase, there was another level of obscuration that manipulates the way in which a rendering software actualizes a digital texture, and how photoshop renders that same texture. This degree of obscuration is executed by the creation of certain moments of photoshopped texture filters within the same image of the raw render.
In this project there are two autonomous forms that create the illusion of a dichotomy rather than a visual articulation of cohesion. In a trivial notion, this illusion represents these flat planes as a form of disruption through the splitting of these objects, but what these planes are argued to do, is create a plane in which the objects have a relationship with the ground. In a way, these planes create a notion of flattened ground where all of these objects have a direct relationship with their planes. This contains the idea of figure and ground and that all of the objects are on the same field of different degrees of flattened representations.
As a whole, this project is a question of representation and translation that… are these objects a representation of the initial object?... or are these objects a creation of new objects that do not rely on the idea of representation; because through the process of photogrammetry, they do produce a representation of what was scanned initially, but because of the control of the input of images processed to purposefully produce tears, these objects become new objects. As a result, the idea of representation does not exist.