My initial point of to start experimenting and creating in this unit lead me to return to a project that sparked the creation for most of my work in the last unit. This project was titled machines and took its inspiration from Buckminster Fuller’s ideas surrounding the invisibility of technology. Through sourced images of mysterious factory equipment and digital collage I endeavoured to create collages that generated around the idea of hidden manufacture. Our social interaction has shifted from glimpses of manufacture to utter invisibility. Our interaction is withheld in the aisles of supermarkets or the sanitised space of the web store. We no longer see our food being picked from the ground or sealed into clean packaging. We do not interact with the factories that create the electronic devices that have become fundamental for communicating in our lives. Our existence has become separated and have turned these objects of manufacture, these machines, into curiosities.
My original pieces involved sourcing images of these machines from wholesale websites or where ever they could be found. Digitally, I cut out each object layered them together to create this complex, convoluted collage. I found the processes effective but fairly limiting. I felt there was no other direction to take this work in or additional layer to incorporate into the work. Such was the case meant that the work remained relatively undeveloped. There was substance to this project and I felt that the underlying themes would encourage more development. I decided to revisit the project and chose to primarily focus on the objects that I was presenting. Each image was made from these borrowed components. The face of the collages became to complex for us to understand and in tern reflected the process of modern day manufacture. A process almost to complex for us to follow. The merging of these objects that had been flattened by the process of collage lead to anonymity of each object as it is camouflages its self with its counterparts.
I felt that I wanted to understand the individual objects a little clearer. I wanted find out the true purposes for these machines and let them become mysteries to other people. My online investigation lead me to discover a whole host of new imagery of these machines. This time these covert machines had been created in virtual 3D CAD objects. This was from a collection of user uploaded content available at Google Warhorse and used for Google’s own CAD software Sketchup. My discovery of this helped defy an aspect of their invisibility. I wondered how I could begin using theses virtual objects to create images. Each CAD object was an accurate representation of a piece of machinery. This representation has the ability to be manipulated and moulded. I began experimenting placing and juxtaposing these objects amongst each other. Before when using 2D image the work seemed to fit together effortlessly only small adjustments had to be made to the compositions of the image. But in the case of the CAD objects there was a whole other dimensions of consideration to be made. I found it hard to piece the objects together. I made variations using the same objects and found a range of success.
The focus became to create this single, large convincing yet inoperable machine. Taking elements from all these opposing machines to create a representation of a world that has become increasingly commodified, containerised and manufactured. This single object has shifted the nature of this work from photography into virtual sculpture. The transition is one that has left me in a fairly unfamiliar zone. There is a strange dynamic between the 3D model and its appearance as a flat image on the screen. I realised that this could still be met with a photographic approach. This was an object that could be photographed. I used a piece of software called KeyShot which is used to simulate light against CAD objects and and it gave me the ability to render objects to incredible high quality. Yet the skills and resources I had available to me meant that it was not possible to create an image that would fool someone into believe this was anything but a virtual object. It was frustrating but not fundamentally vital to the existence of the images.
How ever I feel that the results of these image miss their intentions. The work becomes too far separated from the real, and the graphics of the images do not support an exposure of any hidden environment. Instead, it creates an alternate alien disconnection. In a way this split between the real and the virtual had the potential to engage with the themes I had set out to address. The retraction from the real photographic image that I had been working with before left us in this strange video game like space encountering an nonsensical object. This disjoint reflected the frankenstein like object that appeared in front of us. I feel the work had become too convoluted, and this mix of themes exerted a lack of expression and representation that had been embedded into the original imagery.
Its been a challenge to accept the nature of the work against what I had before. I feel that I could have tired to work around this and had a more comprehensive selection of objects that could have then been paired accordingly. The results of this imagery have not really inspired or motivated me to continue along this vein.
Despite this, for the purpose of habit and to get into expressing and thinking of how I would present this work has the potential to take many forms. The first and easiest to achieve would be to display prints of these images just as we see them in the images on this blog. this would be a rather dull approach and I feel that this is part of the reason that the work is some what unsuccessful. In an ideal world and with the technical skill to be able to do it, it would be great to create this object in a game engine that would allow the viewer to interact (move and view the work) either on screen or perhaps in virtual reality.
This process has helped me gauge how effective it is to be using software (that has the potential to rival commercial product photography) like KeyShot and how rendering is encroaching into photography’s space. Part of my work’s failure has resulted from not investing enough of my own time in this specific work, and I feel that if I was to return to the themes of this work again it would be through the photographic image instead of the 3D virtual object.