Painting Polygons

Hyper Geography by Joe Hamilton

2011-12-05T10:41:00.003Z

Just come across Joe Hamilton's Hyper Geography. The video fuses images of landscapes and digital technology. There's a mix of a lo-fi jpeg textures with high-end and low-end 3D renders. There may even be a bit of live action footage in there as well.

Hamilton's Tumblr site includes a quote from Raymond Williams which helps illuminate the focus of the work:

"What in the history of thought may be seen as a confusion or an overlapping is often the precise moment of the dramatic impulse."

So clearly the work deals with overlapping and intersection between technological and natural worlds. It's quite post-structural in that it 'pulls' at the point where the 'text' seems to point in more than one direction. My immediate response, however, focussed less on the conceptual and more on the aesthetic, which I thought was a kind of slick but jarring digital joinery. The more I think about this theme, the more I like it. There's a lot of mileage in the idea of digital joins and seams, visibility or invisibility, integration or disintegration.

Much high end 3D and digital imagery is all about seamlessness - if you can see the joins it means the craftmanship is bad. This leads me to think about real world traditional joinery - cabinetry, marquetry etc - and the opposing approaches to seams or joints. First is the 'artisan' technique of constructing seamless joints (dovetail, butt, bridle, mortice and tenon and so forth). The second is the resurgent rustic or 'heritage' technique, where you allow the construction to show through. The latter method is perceived as more 'honest' and down to earth. It's quite attractive to the back-to-basics hippie hipster crowd who want to bake their own bread, homeschool their children and build their own eco-homes.

The parallel between digital and wooden joinery is slightly tenuous, but I like the idea that by making seams and joins apparent, the construction of an object is highlighted. The joins leave an obvious trace of the maker and the making. Joe Hamilton's Hyper Geography draws attention to the construction process in some places, whilst pulling off quite marvellous joinery tricks in others. It's like a hybrid cabinet, fully assimilated in places and awkwardly co-existing in others.

Whether this supports his apparent attempt to explain how the digital is beginning to integrate with the natural is up to you... I'll just continue thinking about digital furniture. This may be an unnatural preoccupation - the other day I was browsing 3D model library and almost bought a chair because I thought it would look nice in my flat!

Virtual Gallery

2011-05-24T12:49:00.003+01:00

The idea of a virtual gallery has been around as long as the internet. Mostly it just means some jpegs on a web page. Of course, the concept has been implemented in a hundred other ways. Google Art Project, for example, lets you navigate through some of the world's best known galleries. But I like what Barmecidal Projects have done. They have sized up the Matthew Marks gallery and recreated it digitally, including a range of works from artists that produce non-material stuff. It reads as a digital simulacrum rather than a faithful reproduction. Not sure whether this indicates a lack of expertise or a deliberate concession to the nature of digital art. Probably a bit of both. And there's a big shiny 3D poo! I love that shit.

I've toyed with the idea of digitally recreating well-known galleries to the point where the viewer couldn't tell the real from the digital. It would be interesting to create documentation of fictional exhibits. These could be personally produced works in which case I'd be faking a career. This in itself would be fairly original and could easily spark a career in itself - the artist who fakes his own 'high-profile' exhibitions via documentation. I guess it could prompt the viewer to consider what the gallery experience consists of - whether you need to be there to appreciate the work and whether work becomes authentic by association. On the other hand, I could rip off, alter, hybridise or destroy existing works. I could even alter the fabric of the gallery itself - repaint, tear down walls, insert windows or extensions. Not sure what the point would be but most of these ideas would inevitably start to question the physical, financial and aesthetic role of the art institution.

I should probably do it.

Outsider Art 3D

2011-05-23T10:43:00.001+01:00

This is fully and completely mental, but that's not a bad thing. I think the work of Katheleen Daniel (or Silicious) was made with Poser and Blender and a bunch of lo-fi techniques. I find it quite funny and grotesque and not entirely without aesthetic value. She's a self-confessed freak and I don't think anyone would deny her that. When I watch her Youtube vids half my brain is grossed-out and intrigued and half is wondering what the CG community would say about this work. I'm fairly certain that it would be ripped to pieces for it's lack of expertise. That CG trolls would have aneurysms over the execution of the animation. I love it when CG trolls have aneurysms.

There's an interview with her here.

Maker's Marks

2011-01-28T11:39:00.003Z

Artist Nate Hess has produced a nice one-liner in the form of his 3D model with fingerprints. The piece is clear but effective: it returns a traditional trace of production to a 3D model. Similar ideas run throughout his work. Craft is Caring I uses cords of Rapid-Prototyped ABS Plastic to replicate traditional fishing knots. Again, returning a personal, traditional trace to an industrial material.

2010-07-25T11:08:00.002+01:00

Peripetics from zeitguised on Vimeo.

Ooooooh, very excited about this. Making of here. I must have missed the post at Motionographer in 2008. Zeitguised also produce stills, see Misshap Wigs and Concrete Chrome.

I have lots of good things to say about this work - I love the painterly compositions: there's a whole careers' worth of imagery in Peripetics, all compressed into just a few minutes. I like the automated animation style - Zeitguised are obviously into the whole Cinema4D 'No Keyframes' trend. Who's to say they didn't pioneer it? Not sure that Peripetics is fully without keyframes, but it certainly employs automation to some degree. It also fuses the lo-fi automated Processing aesthetic with photoreal rendering to produce something with more interest than your usual Zhestkov-derived Cinema4D shininess.

The opening sequence reminds me a lot of Matthew Barney's Cremaster series. Partly because of the colour palette but also because it seems to describe a system of creation/procreation/mutation.

The only thing I'd question about Peripetics is the environment or 'stage' for the animations. It's very White Cube. There's a lot of crappy art criticism out there but one essay that's pretty good is Brian O'Doherty's Inside the White Cube. Extract:

"The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is "art." The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values."

Basically my reservations about the environment of Peripetics is a reponse a more widespread tradition of presenting 3D animations/models in a White Cube-esque space. It's a reliable way to enhance the impact of the 3D model or animation, much like adding lens flare and camera jiggle is a shortcut to making 2D animations look 'cool' or 'professional'. It's a bit of a cheat.

Purging Polygons

2010-07-13T16:01:00.004+01:00

There's a feature in Maya that lets you reduce the amount of polygons in a mesh. Maya triangulates your mesh, removes some faces and averages what's left. It's a cool button to click - you can keyframe it and animate a complex object - a human form, for example - devolving into angles and planes. I've got a few renders kicking around of the process, but wasn't until today that I came across the Lo Res Project which involves architect Rem Koolhaas. This post over at Dezeen pretty much sums the project up - great visuals of the reductive Lambourgini. The comments at Dezeen also led me to Xavier Veilhan's site. He makes public sculptures that have the reduced poly feel about them. Delving deeper into his site reveals that the sculptures do indeed begin life in a 3D program.

Much like depth mattes this convention is unique to 3D modelling programs. It's a paradigm introduced to the collective visual lexicon via 3D, though it leans a lot on futurist aesthetics: I'm thinking especially of the famous works of Umberto Boccioni.

Quayola

2010-07-05T10:02:00.002+01:00

Strata #3 - Excerpt from Quayola on Vimeo.

Found this via Top 10 list by Jon. It's by Quayola, a multimedia digital artist from London. It's beautifully executed - an excellent motion graphics piece that takes certain Processing techniques that have been prevalent over the past year or so and really exemplifies how to do them properly. That said, I'm not too taken with the blurb on the site, including: "...the term Strata defines a geological formation made of multiple layers of rock. Each one of these layers has its own individual characteristics and history, which combined produce beautiful and unique formations… "

My background in Fine Art kinda makes me sensitive to blurb/blurbing/abuses of blurb. More often than not blurb is tagged on the work to quickly elevate a piece from aesthetic to intellectual or conceptual. I'm not sure that this piece is intellectual per se - it's technically interesting, but not really a comment on culture or art history. In fact, it almost comes across as a promotional video for a Processing toolkit. And that's no bad thing. But triangularising classical painting does not automatically make that piece a lasting comment on culture. It does, however, make it look shit hot.

Kjell Varvin

2010-06-22T15:01:00.002+01:00

A bit off topic, but I'm in love with these sculptures. In a really detached, formalist way. First seen here.

Yves Netzhammer

2010-06-21T13:42:00.003+01:00

Really digging the work of Yves Netzhammer. He makes animations and installations, often involving 3D animation and 2D illustrations. There are grainy films on Youtube here and here. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007, gallery here, and San Francisco MOMA, info here.

For me, the immediate visual touchstone for Netzhamer's work is Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare... There's a mechanical, mythological feel to the work that hints at the same system of fetishised dynamics that Duchamp's Bride pioneered. Netzhammer places more emphasis on figuration than Duchamp, but his figures still feel detached - like dummies or place-holders for real human or animal bodies. There's a definite sense of these figures being bound up in mechanical experiments.

Check out some more work at Galerie Anita Beckers.

Better Bouncing Ball

2010-06-17T16:37:00.005+01:00

Just been looking at this post on Rhizome. It's ringing bells with me because I've spent the past few weeks working with 3D animation dynamics for Mainframe. Repeating the same simulations over and over with minor tweaks to try and approximate authenticity. Better Bouncing Ball by Michael Bell Smith encapsulates this process as well as making me think about science and art, technology, creativity and obsessiveness. Yeah, that's a lot of thunking.

The piece essentially shows repeated revisions of a ball bouncing across the screen. I fully expected to see the simulation improve over time, but it actually deteriorates and goes haywire before returning to form and skewing off again. A metaphor for design AS WELL AS LIFE. The effect is quite comical in places. Aesthetically, It's lovely - very orthographic, stark and geometric. It's like a meta-exercise in a)design, b)real-world physics, and c)psychology. I say meta-exercise because I think the piece says something about the attempt to create or replicate. And maybe the confusion between the two.
Could just be me though.

Reverse Perspective

2010-06-17T10:42:00.005+01:00

True Reverse Perspective from JMS on Vimeo.

Really interesting piece exploring reverse perspective - that is, when objects far away are larger rather than smaller. The animation was produced by animation student Jeremy Mooney-Somers, and is actually is a 'proof of concept' for TRP functionality (True Reverse Perspective). He's also produced a similar proof of concept for Maya (here) but it's nowhere near as nice looking. Alhough the scenery is probably purely functional - an equivalent of the ubiquitous 3D test rabbit - I love the aesthetic. There's something really painterly about it, most likely because reverse, or byzantine perspective has a history of it's own, going back to Byzantine times (yeah, beats me - I think it was part of the past? Like, olden times?). Anyway, it's a familiar, eerie effect. Familiar because I've come across those Russian religious icon images before, like here, and eerie 'cos it makes sense to the eye but also sorta scrambles it. The cool thing is that 3D animation can work with this so easily. You can swap around your camera with such ease and precision that exploring the technique would be fun.

Here's a little more about reverse perspective.

Spectacular Society Corporation

2009-12-20T14:23:00.003Z

why not from monfieur on Vimeo.

Really like this piece by Spectacular Society Corporation.
The work has much in common with some other artists I've looked at on this blog: Al and Al and John Russell. What I like about the video above is the sense that the hardware is failing the software. It looks like what happens when you ask a computer to compute a complex physical simulation. It stutters. Again - and this is a preoccupation of this blog I think - the work exposes the technical foundations that enable and, in this case, disable it. the backdrop is a bit spurious but the collage aesthetic is charming and very much at odds with the perfectionist medium of computer simulation.

Digital Art is a blind jester

2009-12-15T11:25:00.009Z

Royal Opera House - Audience - "Man in the mirror" from rAndom International on Vimeo.

The reviews of Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the V&A in London got me thinking again about popular conceptions of digital art. There's a lot of coverage here. As I write, I'm listening to an audio review - BBC World Service correspondent Mark Coles expressing incredulity at the work in a pretty predictable way. The whole 'is it art' question. Yawn. It's a good question to ask but you get the feeling that Coles would ask the same kneejerk question of anything that wasn't Vermeer. Still, I'm asking similar questions myself.

My problem is I just don't feel moved by many of these artworks. I think they're mostly cool, clever, well-executed: descriptions better suited to graphics or interiors perhaps. Even the ones I really like, like the Digital Dandelion by Sennep or rAndom International's well-known mirror piece, Audience, struggle to convey conceptual or visual tension, resting instead on novelty. Both pieces look nice though.

Lack of emotional richness is an ever present challenge to digital art, and I think artists are aware of this challenge. Golan Levin, whose work consists of an interactive eyeball following you around the gallery (see it here), says that digital art needs to move past a simple tendency towards the 'demonstration of a technological principle' - it should attempt to explore the wider social aspect of that technology. Levin proposes that his eyeball piece 'reverses spectatorship' and 'turns the gaze back on the viewer'. Speculating that the piece has such depth is overegging the pudding I think. I'd honestly rather look at a painting about an eye that follows you everywhere (Odilon Redon maybe) or read a book about it. The difference with Levin's interactive piece is that the eye follows you, the real you, here and now. Given that the sensation of being looked at is not new to me, or anyone for that matter, what's unique about this piece is that the eye is automated. Which is clever. Well done.

The same trick is used throughout the interactive pieces in the exhibition. Pictures that change when you are point or wave or scream or gargle. To me, interacting with this sort of art is alienating - the technology feels primitive. It's like being in court with a blind jester who peforms when he senses your presence. Or something. I feel like I'm getting a substitute for interaction. Which would be fine if the work was about substitutes for interaction, but digital art is often heralded as some new exciting mode of interaction. It doesn't often promote it's own shortcomings. Or maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough about it.

rAndom International's piece, Audience, does have a nugget of self-reflexivity I think. It plays with mirrors, which makes me think of Lacan's mirror stage theory. Which in turn makes me conscious of the digital art predicament I've been talking about: the sense of distance between self and object. Or, to put the whole thing another way, the piece conjures up in my mind the image of a child mesmerised by it's own reflection, slowly distinguishing (or combining) their body, their sensations and their mind. And this reinvents the piece for me: whilst many might sell Audience on the basis of quirkiness, if you think about these mirrors as a demonstration of a very primitive yet integral self-realisation exersize, the whole piece seems charming, intelligent and a little sad maybe. Any artwork using mirrors plays with the idea of inversion and identity, but Audience anthropomorphises the mirrors into little faces. Instead of the face tracking it's own reflection, the reflection is tracking the face. Nice.

Still, when most interactive art pieces are based around the ability to track the viewer's movement, and easy route to self-reflexivity is the use of mirrors or eyeballs.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts....

Title Sequence Joy

2009-12-04T12:19:00.004Z

Nice little title sequence here for How We Built Britain . I think it was made by a guy called Gareth Edwards, though I can't find a direct attribution anywhere.

I'm not a typehound like many graphics designers and motion graphics artists - primarily because I'm not particularly attracted to the closed system and rigid setting of typography - but this piece plays with type quite freely. Some of the buildings have been perfectly conceived, modelled and textured all in glorious HD and the overall effect is superb. But I've noticed a little criticism here - mainly technies picking apart the quality of the motion track and typophiles lamenting the use of a bog-standard font like Arial. To me, it looks great and I would have loved to work on it - I imagine that there were legions of BBC viewers cooing 'oooh, isn't that clever' into their tea when watching this.

Realflow + Pollock = Thongchai Chanyathitikul

2009-09-29T22:18:00.005+01:00

I've come across this work occasionally while surfing the VFXTalk/CreativeCrash galleries and it always sticks out. I have no need to click on it time and again, but the fact I do means it must have something extra.

It's by Thongchai Chanyathitikul and it's made with Realflow, Maya and Photoshop - in that order. Realflow to generate a splash, Maya to add colour and texture and Photoshop to... well, whatever is left to do. Jiggery pokery I guess.

Obviously it owes a lot to Pollock, but what's cool is that this guy is using a piece of software that engineers physically accurate water and he's doing something experimental with it. The tension between the almost industrialised functions of the software (algorithms, computations, physics) and the playful, painterly result of the image is interesting.

In a way, this opposition between the scientific/industrial and the painterly/expressive is an extension of the tensions observed by historians in Pollock's work. He was like the John Wayne of painting: stoic, abrupt, masculine, seemingly lacking in expression. His famous drip method was a feat of repetition and determination (albeit with ephemeral results). As such, he contradicted the image of the painter as the sensitive soul grappling with representation and reality, umm-ing and ahh-ing over this mark or that brushstroke. As a man he seemed too plain and inexpressive to be a painter. Well, in the tools of CG we have the industrial, the obtuse, the plain, the undecorated. CG was born from the aerospace industry after all - these programs were made for physical simulation. Yet from that toolset we get abstract images like the one above that seem to defy their industrial origins and seem far more free than the software that made them.

Of course, there are plenty of pieces of software out there that attempt to bridge the gap between artist and technician. More often than not, however, it's the technician that reaches the level of knowledge that facilitates experimentation. And that's why I find this image so admirable. Realflow is hard on the mind and hard on the processor, yet this guy has ploughed through and come out the other side with something quite unique and unexpected.

Kazuki Takamatsu and the Depth Matte

2009-09-12T14:17:00.011+01:00

The delicate, creepy, beautifully executed work of Tokyo artist Kazuki Takamatsu caught my attention recently. He uses the style of a depth-matte render (an image format native to 3D modelling programs, which displays depth information as a monochromatic scale: white is close, black is far away). I'm not sure whether these are straight-up depth matte images or, as suggested somewhere else on the web, gouache paintings. It doesn't really matter anyway - however they have wound their way to our eyes, I'm pretty certain that they started off, at least in inspiration, from depth matte images. There's no natural precedent for this style of image (we don't 'see' like this, ever), but I'd argue it is an established convention - it's stylistic identity is as strong as pointillism or stained glass or the polaroid. Yet it came about as a by-product of 3D programs. For those of you who don't know what a depth matte (or z-depth) layer is, it's normally used to help compositors very the focus in a shot. Rendering off a depth matte layer (as well as your full colour 'beauty' layer) brings 3D information into a 2D composition. The compositor can select the depth of field in a shot by selecting their preferred tonal range between black and white.

I've been wanting to render rippling cloth in depth matte for a while now because I knew it would have a ghostly quality. Takamatsu seems to have tapped into the ghostliness of this particular image format in inimitable Japanese style. I bet we see animations in this style popping up from now on. Maybe one of them will be mine.

My Showreel

2009-09-08T17:50:00.005+01:00

Showreel 2009. from Alan Warburton on Vimeo.

So I've spent the past 6 months making my showreel. I faced a choice earlier this year to carry on in the vein of my Arts Council funded art project (more info here) or to really get stuck into some CG. I decided on the latter and I'm pretty pleased with the results. I have literally spent every available minute working on a series of short animations to string together into a reel and it's finally done! Now I'm looking for work and putting off the inevitable (re-cutting the reel to look better).

The Graveyard

2009-02-24T10:42:00.006Z

Just picked up on this via Pixelsumo. It's a short videogame designed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn which consists of an old lady walking through a graveyard. The aim of the game is to guide (escort?) her through the graveyard to a bench where she can sit. Then we listen to a song about death and graveyards. Then we walk back out with her. Without her dying (in the full version of the game she can die at any moment). I felt like the Grim Reaper, stalking.

There's an interesting post-mortem of the project here, explaining where the idea came from and how it progressed through production.

I finally realised why people get excited about the crossover between movies and gaming. The Graveyard is a rare example of an experience that's cinematic *and* interactive, and which does both credibly. It's an existential reflection on gaming and life that demands you slow down, take in the scenery, appreciate the time it takes to accomplish things.

Take a look at Tale of Tales, Harvey and Samyn's game company. Some really cool stuff there, all apparently drawing inspiration from folk tales.

Now there's a thought... folk tales and games... both ways of retelling stories. Hmm.

My Robot

2009-02-24T10:31:00.002Z

Drone #3317 from Alan Warburton on Vimeo.
Here's what I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. It was an attempt to replicate a full CG workflow: I shot the HD source video and camera tracked it, then designed, modelled, textured, rigged and animated the robot. And of course, composited it together - badly I think!

Interview: Gero Gries

2009-02-12T16:14:00.008Z

Today I'm lucky enough to have an interview with Gero Gries - I'm a big fan of his work and he's a key figure when it comes to CGI and fine art. He's been at it since the early nineties and has exhibited through Europe and the US. His work escapes the cliches of CGI and creates a dialogue between the traditions of painting and the possibilities of 3D technology. Check out his latest work. The image above is from 2008 and is entitled 'Zone'.

PP: Hi Gero. First off, how would you describe your work?

GG: My imagination is more or less photo realistic, this is a reason why I use this medium. Besides this, my interest is the continuation of painting with 3D tools, being part in the evolution of a new medium. The results looks more or less photo realistic, but photo realism is not the purpose, but a means to involve the viewer. My aim is to communicate a certain visual idea or emotion.

PP: What got you interested in CGI?

GG: In 1991/92 I spent a year as artist in residence in ArtCenter in Pasadena which is also a major education center for automobile designers. For this reason General Motors subsidized ACCD with a state of the art computer lab in the basement. I had been interested in CGI before, but the medium was still to expensive for my small budget in the eighties. I took an introduction course and felt attracted too the medium. My first CGI image was a proposal for a light installation. It was abstract and real at the same time. After returning from USA I started with my own computer. I felt a bit like a pioneer with unclaimed property under my feet.

PP: What tools do you use?

GG: Nowadays mostly Vue XStream 7 and Cinema 4D with VRay as render engine, but most of my imaging till 2004 was done in FormZ and a little Maya.

PP: Where do you find your inspiration?

GG: I'm kind of hunting and gathering my images. I don't want to let this process become too conscious, because being attracted to something is too complex to be handled by reason. If I come across an interesting image in my mind or elsewhere, I let it sink down and after a while, when it is sedimented (a process of forgetting and remembering), I try to build it.

PP: I love your image 'Zone' - it seems that this has emerged from the sort of process you describe - the process of remembering and forgetting. Another thing that attracts me to this image is it's relationship to the image 'Nirvanagoodbye'. Through the use of colour (and the fact that the images appear next to each other on your website) it seems as though we're seeing the interior and exterior of the same location, even though I think the 'Nirvana' series predates 'Zone'. I guess my question is whether you reuse your 3D scenes and 'shoot' them from different angles? I find this idea of reusable assets really exciting and unique to CGI. There's also the idea that by creating these 'unheimlich' images using 3D software, there's a tension or contradiction between the unchartable space of the dream and the vector-perfect simulation of the 3D scene.

GG: 'Nirvana' and 'Zone' are not the inside and outside of the same scenery, but I do work this way. 'Departure' from 2007 and 'Wenn' from 2008 for example base on the same 'set'. I often reuse maps, textures and furniture. The chair in 'Nirvana' is the same as in 'Token' from 2006 and so on. The point of the 'shot' or viewer as I usually refer to it, often changes during image construction, til it finds it's final destination. I often have half a dozen render cams in a 'set' before it is finished.

PP: Where are the limits of CGI? What can't be done? What would you like to do but can't?

GG: That depends on the way you are going. If mere photorealism is the aim, human imaging is still the most difficult item. My approach is a bit different: My interest is the intrinsic properties of the medium. So every result has it's own justification. It is my decision to say whether I want or not, and my decision is not controlled by photo realistic interest, which is, to be honest, a bit boring after a while. Tweaking realism is where the game gets interesting.

PP: Your work seems to me to be hyper real rather than photo real - finely detailed but very 'clean'. Is this a conscious decision?

GG: Almost every decision in CGI is conscious. To add dirt and stained surfaces is a conscious decision. Dirtiness isn't, unlike in reality, the natural state in CGI. I have to have a certain creative intention to add dirt, which I actually do sometimes.

PP: Modelling dust and detritus could probably get quite boring though!

GG: You are right!

PP: Do you think of your artistic practice as similar to any traditional art forms - painting or sculpture, for example?

GG: Painting is the reference, although modeling reminds more of sculpting. But I'm often enough a lazy modeler.

PP: I've noticed your earlier work includes a lot of images that look like ghostly re-renders of institutional spaces and show-homes. Was this a deliberate decision?

GG: In part: There were still severe hardware and software restrictions. On the other hand I was interested in the interior as a genre. You can't really separate the tracks that lead to an image. Let's put it like this: I was interested in what I could do.

PP: Your new work seems to involve more vegetation - can you tell me more about this?

GG: In evolving my interiors, I came to a turning point. The image that marks this point was 'Einblick' from 2007. Although it is not a strict change, there have been exteriors before and interiors after this image, it marks the shift from inside to outside. Actually not only in my sujets (is this French word also known in English? In German it means depicted scenery).

PP: I think the German meaning is unique - 'sujet' from French translates simply as 'subject'. I was thinking that the change in your work not only involves more exterior scenes but exterior scenes with vegetation. From a technical perspective, making vegetation look authentic and unregulated can be quite difficult. Your vegetation looks authentic but is still regulated in many ways. I'm thinking of 'Paddy' and 'Plantage', where nature is to some extent 'contained'. I'm wondering whether you approach the limits of CGI vegetation as a technical challenge to be overcome or rather as something to play with conceptually.

GG: I have a playful mind and to overcome technical challenges is not my main interest in CGI.

PP: What are you working on at the moment?

GG: I'm clearing my head for a next step. As an intermediate interest I'm playing with traditional painterly approaches in the shape of CGI. An example is 'Containerlandia' from 2009. It's an attempt to transfer abstract painting to an CGI environment.

PP: This image stood out as something quite different - I definitely recognised art references (Donald Judd/Daniel Buren/Sean Scully etc). 'Cistrans' has something optical (i.e. op-art) and minimal about it, and 'Uhuhpool' reminded me a little of Hockney's pool rendering. I personally think these are your strongest images to date and I look forward to seeing what you do next.

GG: Thank you!

PP: How do you know an image is 'finished'?

GG: Good question. In the old days I worked after this formula: An image is finished if every attempt to improve it makes it worse. Today telling when an image is finished isn't so difficult any more. There is a certain strain when an image gets overworked. After finishing, I have more difficulties with the question if the image is good or not. This is how I handle it: Sometimes I know it on the spot, sometimes I ask my wife, sometimes I try to forget the image after making, without looking at it for 1-2 month. After that time I usually know what it's worth.

Angel of the South

2009-02-10T13:49:00.006Z

News just in. Mark Wallinger has won the tender to produce the Ebbsfleet Landmark - a giant white horse that will tower over the new developments around Ebbsfleet.

The Ebbsfleet project is one of a few high profile public commissions that utilise visualisation, alongside the Fourth Plinth scheme in Trafalgar Square. Whilst discussing public sculpture and visualisation, this blog has quite a few examples of public sculpture in situ, and the striking thing is that so many of them look like visualisations.

The same problem is illustrated over and over on the website of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. It shows an impressive catalogue of perfectly rendered public sculptures. Many of these have the qualities of virtual objects - matte, evenly coloured, cartoonified forms which are documented from overhead, apprehended like museum objects on a massive scale. Take a look especially at Balancing Tools. Is it just my eyes, or does this look computer-generated? It was installed in 1984, so the photographs predate decent CGI.

I wonder what it is that makes these sculptures look unreal? And why the intersection of computer visualisation and public sculpture interests me? Perhaps it's the tension between the visualisation and the real thing: how the work is 'sold' prior to it's implementation. Always from a flattering angle. Always instantly apprehended for what it is. Hmm..

Clarity Gets Interrupted

2009-02-10T12:05:00.007Z

Just been doing my regular trawl of the net in search of CG + Fine Art goodies, and I began considering how CG images often tread the line between visual conventions and how the production of virtual objects/scenes is always open to interpretation in terms of aesthetics and process. Once again, the apparent clarity and precision of CGI masks it's ambiguity.

An example of aesthetic polysemy in CGI: Martin Dorbaum has a 'series' of images here, cut from the same aesthetic cloth which sometimes come close to resembling game environments, sometimes architectural visualisations, sometimes photographs, sometimes hyperrealist paintings. The image could go one way or another depending on resolution, render settings, modelling techniques, camera angle and so forth. Treading the fine line between a game environment, a photograph and an architectural visualisation is what makes these images work as art, what makes them rich subjects for study.

Regarding process, suppose we think of sculpture and CGI - when an artist makes a 3D scene or 3D scans an object he creates sculptures which could be considered as copies of real objects, as 'virtual' originals, or as blueprints for real world 3D printouts (see Michael DeLucia or Chris Cornish). The story of a real world sculpture, might, like in the case of Chris Cornish, be tied up in a conceptual relationship with the virtual object.

These issues are not new - traditional art forms have been dealing with similar issues for a hundred years. But the fact that these issues are revitalised and relevant to CGI is what excites me. For many people, the attraction of a computer generated image or sculpture is it's detail and precision. But this is a complex production method, full of diversions, contradictions, unspoken ideologies, technical hitches and unexplored possibilities. The clear, precise images that find their way to our screen or to a gallery wall obscure a wealth of conceptual tangles native to the medium. Some reveal these issues, and I'm sure more will follow.

The composition of productivity

2009-02-04T16:59:00.004Z

Love this image. Found it here. There's something about modular furniture and management theories that I find bizarrely stimulating. Like there's a recipe for productivity and that can be achieved through office layout. I long to do a project about this - I'd make a series of office layouts geared towards specific tasks, intra-office politics, unlikely social scenarios etc... It would examine the idea of formal composition in the manner of a constructivist painter whilst anchoring those compositions to management theories, like 5S. My mind is drooling.

Arch Viz and Objecthood

2009-02-04T09:02:00.005Z

Some time ago, Dezeen posted about Zahah Hadid Architects' sculptural installation at an historic Italian home - Andreas Palladio’s Villa Foscari near Venice. I've only just come across Dezeen, so the Hadid's sculpture is old news now. Nonetheless, interesting to note how - first off - the sculpture is an art object in the classic modernist sense. Behold. It's even called 'Aura'. Is this a cheeky nod to Walter Benjamin's famous essay?

It's obviously designed by architects who are well-versed in the postmodern, and I guess that's why this essentially unadventurous piece comes with so much baggage: it was apparently designed to reflect a putative generative algorithm based on Palladian proportions and musical notation (or something like that). The blurb, as ever, is confused and awkwardly trumpets something that basically looks quite familiar (and a little like chewing gum):

"[Aura] doesn’t collide with the beauty and harmony of Palladian interiors nor does it hide the perception of its frescoes".

It "allows [you] to experience its spaces both walking through and circulating around" and "puts in context the humanistic anthropocentric vision of architecture"

But it is not supposed to be a:

"tool for reading hidden meanings through its gaps".

Oh well. Despite all the bluff it's coming off like an oversized ornament.

Anyway, putting aside my vociferous ambivalence to the work itself, the real reason I'm interested in it is because it hints at a few questions about arch viz as a form of documentation, as ideological apparatus and as a continuation of the debate about art and objecthood.

The three jumping off points for such an investigation might be:

1) Viz as sketch
There's a sense that the experience of looking at a visualisation offers a substitute for (or falls below) the actual experience of being with the work. Like looking at a sketch. I tend to pass over this option as a viz patently goes beyond the sketch and is potentially an analog for documentation.

2) Viz as photo
Maybe the visualisation does a good job - it reproduces what we might actually see. Despite my cynicism, it's worth considering that in the case of 'Aura', given the industrial fabrication techniques available to architects, producing a seamlessly joined, highly reflective, uniformly smooth and complex object like this is actually possible. In this case, does the viz act as pre-documentation? And does it suffer the same problems as documentation? As a substitute? Does it fall below actual experience of the work?

3) Viz as ideal
There's also a real possibility that the visualisation idealises the work and goes beyond what we can experience first-hand. It offers us the role of an ideal observer, like in a science experiment. Here is where ideas start to open up: is the viz a friend to Fried? Does it continue the lineage of 'Art and Objecthood' by offering us, the viewer, the ideal conditions for contemplation - in visualising the work from the perspective of an ideal lone viewer in the ideal location on a bright day?

Given the three possibilities outlined above, looking at the image of 'Aura' initiates an amalgamation of viewing modes that characterises the medium as a problematised mode of production, a ripe candidate for interrogation as a loaded and ambiguous ideological apparatus.

Matchmoving mishaps

2009-02-02T21:45:00.005Z

Stumbled across this matchmoving test, which shows a scene from The Shining halfway through the process of 3D asset integration. There's a wonderful moment when the film almost becomes a painting - depth gives way to flatness and then back again. Another one of those moments when I catch a glimpse of a potential artistic diversion amongst a CGI workflow. Yummy.

John Russell - graven images

2009-01-09T11:48:00.008Z

Jonathan Jones reported in the Guardian that he was blown away by one of John Russell's Ocean Pose series, calling Russell "one of the most important artists of early 21st-century Britain." Seeing that the image in question - currently on display at the Royal Academy - was computer generated, I thought I'd have a look for myself.

I think the key to looking at this work is to compare the treatment of the figures with the treatment of the 'manufactured' objects - which are either manufactured physically - the car, or culturally - the unicorn. Is the artist treating the two in the same way? It seems not - putting aside the tricky fact that all of the objects in the scene are manufactured in some sense (they are imported stock models plonked into a basic Bryce seascape), there's a discrepancy between the car, unicorn and human models. The figures seem both aggrandised and disfigured - lovingly tended yet carelessly finished. Their treatment reminds me a little of how a child carefully creates complex, static scenes with Barbie and Ken, yet Barbie's hair is scrunched and Ken's trousers are falling down. Contrast this with the car and the unicorn, which both look perfectly realised, and there's a point to be made. This point is either that it's easier to make CG cars look real than it is to do the same with CG humans - OR that the enraptured figures depict humanity trapped amongst the collage of ideology and idolatry it generates. Can we ever live up to the images we create, or do we suffer as imperfections in their wake?

The figures in these sickly scenes could alternately be seen to revel in the landscape and yearn to be apart from it. But being in the landscape sees their integrity compromised by glitches - fingers emerge from a chest, wigs fall off mannequin heads, Second Life costumes and rubbery bare flesh intermingle in the orgiastic centerpiece of a barren, feverish version of a classic painting. These are hellish visions that depict a permeated, compromised and makeshift body. But I don't think this is a negative thing. And perhaps neither does the artist. There is, after all, a joy apparent in the stances and expressions of the figures in the Ocean Pose series.

This aspect of the images reminded me a little of the work of Adam Zeretsky an artist who works with art, biotechnology and transgenics. He seems to champion genetic mutation and proliferation, biological experimentation and polymorphism. From what I understand, he celebrates biology as the site of creativity. This rings a lot of bells for me as I've lately been thinking quite a bit about the body and the tension between it's percieved sacredness and it's potential for radical self-expression and empowerment. Perhaps one of the ideas that the Ocean Pose images start to depict is the chiasmic crossover between the hyperreal graven image and the increasingly eroded and permeated body. Or maybe all this is just blurb, as much as the claims that Ocean Pose is "a fiction of an artwork-as-event-as-prophecy-and/or-curse of the unleashing of the power of the false". There's some more ridiculously sensationalist information about the artist at Matt's Gallery.

Anyway, have a look at this film which provides some bombastically sountracked close-ups of the work. From what I read here, I'm deducing that the style of the film is a tongue-in-cheek mimic of the sort of fast, dramatic editing art history documentaries use to liven up historical paintings.

Rethinking the basics

2008-09-03T09:51:00.007+01:00

Totem, originally uploaded by Syntopia.

Found this via fffound (what a website!). It's by Mikael Christensen and was originally shown on his Flickr page. Apart from the simplicity of the image and the ever-pleasing use of global illumination, the image sparked off a few thoughts.

I started to ask myself what would have happened if this image had been posted to a CGTalk or HighEnd3D forum? The answer is probably that it would have been criticised or ignored for being simplistic and unoriginal. But what would the same audience think if they knew more about the image - that it had been created entirely in open source code (and pretty elegant code at that), that it was being produced without a user interface, entirely experimentally?

There's a playground mentality to a lot of forum posts: there's a drive for bigger files, better raytracing, faster processing, ambitious scenes - and for everything to be judged by the way it looks, not how it was made. But actually, ambition and creative thinking needn't manifest itself at the bombastic end of the industry - there's still interesting developments at the basic end of CG graphics, as proved by the use of Processing, Sunflow, Blender, Context Free and Structure Synth. And as demonstrated by creative Maya scripters, who can turn what would have been weeks work of manual labour into the click of a button.

This sentiment is particularly pertinent to me as I've gone back to basics recently - I've started drawing again, in pen and ink. Ink is unforgiving as you can't erase it, so I've been practicing and practicing the same lines over and over so that they become effortless, expressive and simple. The simplification process is familiar to many fine artists - often a single line can be more evocative and successful than an elaborate masterpiece. Applying the same principle to CGI is something I'm really interested in, but the hostility towards simplicity in the CG industry is overwhelming. Soon they will have built a city without figuring out the best way to make a brick.

The Fountain + Peter Parks

2008-08-07T08:55:00.008+01:00

One of the most unique uses of CGI in film recently was 'The Fountain' by Darren Aronovsky. The film has become known for it's creative use of visual effects - the director claims that the VFX scenes were 98% in-camera effects and only 2% CGI. Watching the film, you'd think there was much more CGI involved, but the majority of the deep-space scenes were made using macrophotography from 'optical sequence' photographer Peter Parks. Who, incidentally, is not a recognised superhero, but did work on the Superman films. His son, Chris Parks also works with macrophotography, but from a more of a fine arts perspective. There's a source film from The Fountain here, and you can see a short film demostrating the composition of some of the low-CG shots here.

Essentially, instead of trying to create complex, chaotic fluid dynamics in a 3D application, Aronovsky went back to basics and asked Parks to take high-res macro films of chemical reactions and the movement of various materials in fluid. What's surprising to know is the domestic materials used to create these sort of shots. I mean, curry powder?:

"Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks' technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites."

This idea is close to my heart as during my degree I made my own version of deep space images using printer ink, detergent, paprika, salt, pepper and water. There's a few of them here. One of my friends, a fashion blogger who I went to art college with, recently compared these images to designer Josh Goot's dresses. Wahey!

Read more about Peter Parks and The Fountain here and here. There's a profile of the vfx for the film here.

Love it.

Test Objects

2008-08-01T07:50:00.006+01:00

Interesting posts here and then here about 3D test objects and the currency they've inadvertently attained.

Designing Film, Filming Design

2008-07-30T09:07:00.007+01:00

For anyone who wants to see the concept for a car advert before it's bought by Volkswagon/Ford/etc, take a look at this. It's a short film by designer/director Maxim Zhestkov, whose website is here. This stuff is generally referred to as 'motion graphics', but I think Zhestkov is one of those protean individuals who designs his films and films his designs.

Inaction in Space

2008-07-30T08:34:00.006+01:00

I found this clip when I was nerding out on Battlestar Galactica VFX trivia. I'm a fan of the latest version of the show, and the effects are excellent, but this animation caught my eye because there's no action in it. I've always wanted to make a CG space film without any action, that simply consists of the view from a spaceship. Like the equivalent of a moving landscape painting. In space. In CG.

Perhaps it's the effect of growing up with Star Wars toys and spending hours dreaming about the Death Star and Cloud City. Being a placid, delicate child, I wasn't obsessed with the huge action scenes - I got immersed in the scenery and the sets.

Surely there was some cabin on a Star Destroyer with a little kid in it, just staring out into space, watching the ships go by. But he was probably blown up with the rest of the Imperial fleet while Mark Hamill survived. Pah.

'Flesh Out' - fantasy, fetish and CG Porn

2008-07-23T10:00:00.011+01:00

Many apologies for the gap in posting. I've been subject to life's unexpected circumstances recently and haven't a chance to blog. But now I'm back,
and what better way to resume my research than with some good old fashioned filth. Well, rather new fashioned filth. Where you don't have to get your hands (or anything else) dirty. Virtual porn, a strange creature.

Over the past 20 years, there's been lots of talk about virtual realities, revolutions in body image and sexuality, how physical appearance might be liberated in 'cyberspace'. The vision I have of this scenario is a bunch of polygonal lizard/alien/human hybrids navigating awkwardly in an attempt to initiate virtual 'interface': this is the sort of illustration of cybersex that's been prevalent in critical/cultural theory for a while now, and it's a bit stale. The contemporary idea of virtual porn is far more sophisticated.

Take a look at this, this and this (perhaps not if you're reading at work, though). Oh, and especially this.

There's a couple of things that interest me about these images - one is the level of control that's been exerted over the female form. The fetishisation of the female body image is a contemporary debate that I'm not particularly keen to join, but I do have a few thoughts about how CG affects it. Although the cartoonification and idealisation of the female form is a long-established practice, most contemporary protagonists are porn directors, fashion designers and artists.

Now, add to these groups now the hordes of technicians and CG artists who spend weeks/months/years privately crafting their ultimate fantasy woman, dictating her form and behaviour in minute detail, and you've got something a little different. I've got no problem with anyone expressing their sexual fantasies, but there's something unique about this new subset of fantasists: I think it's the opportunity that CGI provides for surpassing our traditional ideas of fetish and fantasy.

With regards to fetish, CG provides the ability to abstract fetish further than ever. There's a real detachment involved in CG porn modelling - you can buy a stock female model and pump, cinch, colour correct and distort her, without needing to come into contact with any real females. There's a subculture of private pornographers, rapidly prototyping, evolving and abstracting their fantasies in hyperreal detail. The 3D application acts as a hothouse for fetish - you can set up your model, provide an interface that allows you to change the form in a hundred different ways, animate this form moving through space, changing in a way that is more flexible and realist than ever. Then you can scrub it and start over, make it more perfect. In this way, CG porn provides a forum for a fetish for which there need be no originary event in a Freudian sense, no willing participants, no conclusive acts. Or perhaps these orginary events and conslusive acts just become files and scenes on a computer: the material of fetish (memory, synapses, stimulation) in part is externalised as reloadable files and scenes. If so, how might digitality affect the construction and evolution of the sexual fantasy/fetish?

In some senses, I find this an potentially revolutionary development, but I sense that I could become a very sensitive area: CGI gives people the power to 'flesh out' their imaginations to the nth degree, which really does flag some issues to do with sex crime, paedophilia, thought policing etc...

The second point (to do with fantasy rather than fetish) is well illustrated by this image.

It's a reader's wife! A vector perfect, hyperreal, reader's wife. In some senses, this reminds me of Craig Kalpakjian's images of dustbins (and no, I'm not comparing women to dustbins). It's been rendered beautifully, but it's not particularly beautiful subject matter. It's trashy, essentially. It's an explicit, private moment that someone has chosen to spends weeks and weeks crafting. There's no real unattainability about this model (I use 'model' in both senses here). Yet what this image does provide (or at least the original file from which the image is rendered) is an absurd level of detail - the mesh shapes that comprise the form of the model are vector-based. What distinguishes vector modelling from other types of modelling is their infinite detail - you can zoom in on a vector without losing resolution (good for industrial design). So here we have a reader's wife, rendered with an infinite, industrial precision. A strange creature, indeed. And perhaps a fantastic piece of modern art.

I could write so much more about CGI and porn - it sparks off a lot of issues about the interaction between digital realism and the psyche. Might need to read a bit more Freud though. And I'm sure Paul Virilio would have something to say about vectors and infinity.

More to come...

Waves, vegetation, complexity

2008-07-03T11:56:00.003+01:00

Untitled, originally uploaded by Alan Monoxide.

Back from my holiday, which was very relaxing indeed.

I was hoping to be able to reflect on some of the issues covered in this blog whilst in Cornwall. But Cornwall's art scene is very traditionalist - the ethos of the St.Ives and Newlyn School dominate. Of course, there are a few galleries working with contemporary art - I saw an Adam Chodsko exhibition at Tate St.Ives and a Bedwyr Williams exhibition at Newlyn Art Gallery. I had mixed reactions to both, which I might talk about another time.

When considering the relationship between the Newlyn/St.Ives schools and CG, I realised that the seemingly limitless potential of CG to replicate the real world in hyperreal detail was actually a fallacy. There were levels of complexity in nature (proliferant greenery and cresting waves were the two things I found especially pertinent) that CGI has a hard time with. In certain artist's work, like that of Eelco Brand, nature is depicted, but it's a creepily patterned, regulated nature. It's probably just a matter of time before that changes. Nevertheless, the space between where CGI fails and photographic reality begins is interesting. It reinforces the specific limitations of CG and in doing so, I think it suggests ways that CGI can be explored.

Oh, and the image above is just one of many I took in Cornwall. It's a pretty place, but I had to work hard to find things that weren't just pretty. This photo is slightly ambiguous, a little intriguing.

Demo Graphics

2008-06-20T21:30:00.005+01:00

I've not posted much for a few days, as I've been working on other things, one of which is this revised version of the image I posted yesterday.

No posts for the next week, away in Cornwall.

Today's project: 'Power to change'

2008-06-18T20:32:00.004+01:00

This is a sketch for a project I'm working on. If it works it'll be cool. I got really excited in the pub when I came up with the idea for the project. I don't know anyone else who gets turned on by a brainstorm based around the word 'conference'.

Norman Foster Virtualisation

2008-06-17T09:38:00.007+01:00

This weekend I visited the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, designed by Norman Foster. Having been to the Bundestag in Berlin and Stansted Airport, I'm getting familiar with Foster's designs: he likes shells, cladding, whiteness, air. The emphasis often falls on the liberating sense of space whilst inside the building, but rarely can you inhabit Foster's designs without a crush of tourists or passengers.

Our visit to the SCVA was different: it's on the edge of town, and at the time of visting was between exhibitions. It was also a Sunday, with intermittently decent weather but very poor transport links. All in all, this was a recipe for a very quiet visit - at points we were the only visitors to the main exhibition area (the rest utilising the restaurant at the end of the building). I had a very uncanny feeling whilst walking around the silent building: the light was so diffuse and the building so clean and well-kept that at times I was completely struck by the feeling that I was one of those blurred figures skating through an architectural visualisation, enhancing but not overpowering the building with my aimless perfunctoriness.

I've had this feeling a few times recently, whilst driving past a new development on a sunny day - a clear, still sky, a scattering of demographically perfect people,
a few well-placed saplings and an optimum viewing distance/angle and suddenly I'm a virtual being, a render camera with all the cares of a sunny bunch of pixels.

Despite the pleasure of feeling that everything is clean and clear and people are relaxed and happy, I can't help but detect something strange about this phenomena - the integration of the visualisation and the reality says something about the spaces. Take a look at Foster's British Museum atrium project here. I just can't tell whether some of the images are visualisations or photographs. If real life starts to mimic the visualisation, where does that leave us?

I understand how the visualisation relates to the final building - if it's good, it predicts it. Perhaps though, if it's really good, it prescribes it. Many of Foster's projects are successful because of his reputation for helping cities create the buildings that define them - inevitably this has lead to a growing canon of revered, idealised spaces that are well maintained and treated with care. Nevertheless, when a building doesn't change, age, discolour or settle after it comes into being I tend to distrust it slightly. Probably because it so seductively reduces me to a model: a moderate, modernist, modest model.

If I were in arch.viz (as it's known) I'd be putting goths and transsexuals and criminals in my images. And I'd get fired and become an artist.

Klaus Schuster (+ Q&A)

2008-06-16T10:40:00.007+01:00

I'm very excited that artist Klaus Schuster has agreed to answer a few questions about his work. You can see some of his work here, as well as the image above, entitled Business Class.

Schuster's work employs the native qualities of CGI (sheen, control, precision) to redouble the signification of certain objects and locations. His practice is split in two but both halves centre around the photograph. He calls this split in his work 'Dirty Hands/Clean Hands'.

On one ('dirty') hand he works with traditional media on newspaper. He doodles on, obscures and defaces photographs found in tabloids, broadsheets, lifestyle magazines and porn. The majority of this work centres around the figure, with many of his subjects taking on the appearance of alienated, fetishized clowns and caricatures.

On the other ('clean') hand he approaches photography from the rear, as it were: his 'self-organisation' project also caricatures photography, yet these CGI images show objects removed from their world with scalpel-like precision. The objects are re-presented with a enhanced clarity that refers us back to the real objects and how we characterise our real relationship to them.

The myriad subjects that Schuster chooses to depict have much in common, but go to varying lengths in their exploration of how CGI might relate to photography.

The golden paper (entitled 'boot' in german or 'start' in English), reminiscent of carbon paper, would suggest that Schuster is engaging in a self-referential exploration of hyperrealism (the copy becomes the original?).

But this theme is taken further with the images of a the polished entrance to Christie's Auctioneers, an American flag and the open door of the US President's private jet, Air Force 1. It seems obvious that these subjects edge towards a critique of the hegemonic possibilities of photographic representation. However, most interesting for me is the image of a golden LP labelled 'The Sounds of Earth' and subtitled 'United States of America, Planet Earth'. This reminds me of the controversial Pioneer plaque which was an image etched on a gold anodized aluminium plaque depicting a representation of humanity and it's (his) location. To attempt to go boldly into a new universe with this culturally warped representation seems to me to be a farcically bombastic example of cultural imperialism. Far from being a 'call sign' or a neutral representation of the world, the image expresses only the conditions of it's own creation - a dirty representational hegemony.

Which is what I think the image of the the record does: the clean CG construction of the work uses clarity and sheen to disguise the dirty issues knotted into the taxonomical representation of objects. Schuster's work boldly goes into a new space of image production, but reminds us that the dangerous possibilities of representation still cling to the image, in ever more stealthy forms. In the post-photographic world of the hyperreal, of manipulated photography, the real is liberated from its dependence on experience: the seductive perfection of the CG image allows signification to play an almost parasitic role: it hitches a ride and enters the viewer on a wave of clarity and gloss.

Given all that, here's what Klaus had to say (he kept it simple!):

Your work is obviously quite diverse in terms of media, but there seems to be a split aesthetic in the main body of your work. As you put it in your website - 'dirty hands/clean hands'. Can you tell me a little more about how this split came about?

'Dirty hands/clean hands' is the title for an exhibition I am having in Graz at the end of the year. You may know that it is a song title by Nick Cave, but is also relates to my different work practices of drawing and CG.

How do you think of your 'self-organisation' project? Is it as sculpture, photography or painting? Or something different altogether?

This project is mainly about images, and the basic idea for them comes from painting. There is an essay in English about “Self-Organisation” on my website, if you are interested to read more about it.

How did you become interested in CG images as art?

I don’t remember really, it just happened…

Do you create the 3D models yourself? If not, what level of involvement do you have in the creation of your images?

Yes, I make it all by myself.

How do you think your work is different to that of a CG artist?

My work has overall a lot of references to painting and fine arts in general.

Do you think your work 'belongs' to, or shares tendencies with, any current movement?

No, I don’t think so.

What do you think might attract people to your CG work? (A difficult question, perhaps! Alternatively, what attracts *you* to the images?)

I believe that it is the balancing act between reality and the artificial that interests people most.

Can you tell me a little about the image 'Business Class'?

I was on a business class flight to New York and these leaflets were handed out, introducing the “new business class”. So actually the work should be called “new business class”…. Having come to think of it, I might change the title!

Where do you see your practice heading?

I wish I knew… Next thing coming up is a three-month grant for Paris.

Many thanks to Klaus for his responses.

Q & A: Chris Cornish

2008-06-11T14:05:00.007+01:00

Above: Chris Cornish, Infinity Cove, 2008

Following my piece yesterday about the work of Chris Cornish, I'm pleased to say that he's agreed to answer a few questions about his work. So here they are:

What's your background - how did you get where you are?

I am 28, born and grew up in the UK. I studied painting at art school and then went onto to complete an MFA, specialising in media. During the last year of my painting course I started to use computer game modifications to either design or create artworks. Buying a game for £30 seemed like a very efficient way to learn 3D.

Alongside my art career I worked for 5 years at a leading 3D and VR company based in the UK where I specialised in 3D scanning and 3D printing. I am now a full time artist and have an honorary research position at the Slade School of Fine Art 'RP Project' - essentially looking at the relationship of art and 3D technology as the latter becomes more pertinent.

What would you say are the themes of your work?

The questions every artist dreads! I guess on a basic level death, war and art (it sounds oh so grand), but these themes are wrapped up in layers of reference, questions and illusion. As my practise develops I am building up a visual vocabulary which is very dependant on computer generated imagery - computer games, 3D software, digital worlds. I am also openly exploring the medium and tools with which I work - I am very interested in what happens when an illusionary process that is supposed to be hidden is exposed.

Can you tell me a bit more about how you came to create the Infinity photographs?

The Infinity series of photographs depict empty photographic or film studios. I wanted to create images that are architectural, painterly, abstract but realistic. And of course they also pay homage to the medium and the tool, the act of photography and film. I like the fact that the subject can be nothing and everything at the same time.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

I try to draw on a wide source of inspiration - architecture, novels, music, film. If I had to name an artist it would probably be Francis Bacon. Or maybe Andy Warhol; his work is far more conceptually complex than the surface would suggest.

Which of your works has had the best reception/most interest?

The film 'Tate Modern'. It was the second film I made and was the first to fully utilise CG elements - it was the result of a lot of personal research and development in 3D software and techniques. I think the subject matter is both romantic and poignant with a little bit of sci-fi thrown in for good measure and is therefore something that a lot of people can relate to.

You work with 3d printing and modelling - is using these tools an important part of your artistic practice - put simply, do you enjoy using them or are they just a means to and end?

Process is very important to me - I enjoy making art work, learning new techniques and using new technologies (whether this is cutting edge 3D stuff or traditional techniques which are new to me). When I stop enjoying the process, or I stop learning, I will stop making art.

I still find the works which utilise 3D Print technology (the 'stage' and 'crater' series) conceptually problematic. By this I mean that I am unsure whether they are a strange fusion of sculpture and manufacture that produce what could be thought of as a 3D photograph and therefore successful; or alternatively they could just be little 3D models, not very far away from model railways etc. and therefore a failure. I think this is something I need to re visit in the future.

More recently I have been using CNC machines to help create larger scale objects from 3D models in which I think process and concept sit more comfortably with each other.

From an insider's perspective, is the CG industry a creative industry to work in?

I spend most of my time trying very hard not to be 'bound by the tool'. In other words although I love it, I sometimes wish I did not know the ins and outs of the software. When I work with people from other disciplines it can be very refreshing to hear their ideas / demands - they do not know what can and can't be done and so their ideas are not formulated to compensate for this and can often lead to more creative work. It took me a long time to learn not to do something just because I can. In fact I think I am still learning that.
Even so I think the tools available to the CG industry are second to none and when used in the right way can be creative, clever and awe-inspiring.

Do you feel part of a community or movement within art?

Not really. I would even go so far as to say I purposely try not be too aware of what other people are doing and concentrate on my own practise. I guess the old cliché of the computer nerd locked up in his bedroom still plays out, even in the trendy art world...

Many thanks to Chris for agreeing to take part.

Chris Cornish

2008-06-10T15:49:00.006+01:00

Above is a photograph by artist Chris Cornish, from the Infinity series (2008) entitled Green Screen 1.

The purpose of green screens and infinity coves is, essentially, to disappear. Chris Cornish turns the camera on both these facilities and draws out the scuffs on the white cove, the edges of the green paint on the green screen. On a very straightforward level, in exposing these details, the photographs pick gently at the apparatus of a constructed CG reality.

Curators feel free to steal that line.

Looking at these photos has had a more curious effect on me, though. The works obviously have a minimalist feel, but I think they share little with the concept of minimalism. Instead, they refer more directly to colour field painting, for example the works of Barnett Newman or, most pertinently, Ad Reinhardt. The latter's black paintings worked hard to force the viewer into finer examination of the flat colour field and entered into a dialogue with other colour field paintings (the ever-awkward Rothko perhaps). They seemed to critique the transcendental interpretations of such 'pure colour' work by using the emptiest of colours, black, to show up the most subtle and nuanced differences between tones. The pocket-size lesson being that even in the most absolute, we find difference - there is no absolute. It's a critique of the idea of purity and the absolute, not just in art, but in experience.

Relating this to the Infinity series by Chris Cornish is interesting. Like the black paintings, the depictions of the green screen and infinity cove take as their jumping off point something that works hard to seem pure and absolute. It then exposes it as only an impression of such things.

Ironically, however, I find it much easier and more rewarding to contemplate 'the transcendental' when looking at the image above than I do looking at a Rothko. In a wry way, I find the higher plane of representation associated with colour field painting well suited to the act of staring at this green screen - instead of saturating me with a sense of something, I look at it knowing that it's purpose is to seamlessly remove a sense of something.

To an extent, both the black paintings and the Infinity series deal with what you can find in emptiness. In the green screen and infinity cove, however, we find the necessary conditions for creating the opposite - fully saturated, seamless new CG reality.

Today's project: 'Fighting in the Street'

2008-06-09T20:41:00.005+01:00

Sometimes I really hate wrestling with CG. This was supposed to be a completely different image, but the computer was winning this argument.

Ilkka Halso

2008-06-08T11:10:00.014+01:00

A friend recommended the work of Ilkka Halso to me, who's getting a lot more buzz than most of the artists linked to from this page - I suppose it's because his work is very 'on trend' in terms of it's themes - global warming, the preservation of nature and so on. It's also because the work falls somewhere between photography, CG and architecture and, as such, pushes a bunch of different buttons.

I think the artist's use of CG is very considered. Why would an artist previously engaged with the process of physically building something turn to CGI? There's a suggestion here:

"Although nature is exceptionally rugged in Halso’s new pictures, it is nonetheless the object of seeing, a painterly reflection, and not a direct space of experience."

This quote reminds me of a thought I had when walking past an inner city allotment the other day. It wasn't pretty, and all around it were new developments and building sites. Despite this, the allotment stood for a different idea of nature. One less like the picturesque Capability Brown landscape or the bluebell wood, and more utilitarian. The allotment provides a 'hands-on' connection that reinforces the idea of nature being something we can have an active relationship with. It's this engagement with popular natural spaces as more than an attraction that rings bells with Halso's work.

The dangers of our passive relationship to nature are addressed in Halso's work - the image of the auditorium built around a waterfall is a particularly good illustration of this idea. Nature is a passive attraction in this picture, and whatever dystopian future this image predicts will have been brought about exactly as a result of such passivity, by a lack of active engagement with nature.

And so to the CGI aspect of the work - here too, there's the idea of refusing to get your hands dirty. Instead of building a real-life expression of the same idea, Halso has chosen to build the structures virtually.

As well as riffing on the idea of passive relationship to nature, the work could be seen to be satirising the relationship of the artist to the art object - nature is 'the object of seeing, a painterly reflection'. The passivity of our relationship to nature has been established by traditional, romantic painting, and it's in the opposition to this tradition that Halso's work finds more in common with the community-based work of someone like Jeremy Deller, whose work overcomes the distance between artist and subject, and who has addressed similar issues himself.

Halso uses CGI as a means of detatching the act of artistic production from a direct engagement with subject matter. The work addresses the dangerous yet alluring potential for CGI to depict a sentimental, romanticised, idealised (yet hyperreal) version of the world. Yet there's more to it than that...

Fine Art + CG = CG Society outrage?

2008-06-06T12:12:00.005+01:00

I posted a thread on the CGSociety's forum yesterday to try and find out if there was anyone out there who was fusing fine art and CGI. It provoked a few heated responses (as anyone who's ever posted in a forum will understand) and some interesting suggestions/links which I'll add here in time.

What came out of it was a feeling that the CG industry still holds sway over the type of work being produced by CG artists. There simply isn't enough autonomy in the art form to allow reflection on what CGI can and does do. I also get the feeling that the software can be so complex for artists that it's far easier just to make a drawing or a sculpture. There was also quite a bit of criticism of Craig Kalpakjian's work (I suggested his work as an example of fine art CGI) from a technical, and artistic, perspective. His image of a CG turd might have been the straw that broke the camel's back!

That said, kudos must be given to those CG artists who do break boundaries and experiment, a lot of whom are in the links to the right, another one here. It seems that to venture into the financially insecure territory of fine art CGI (CGI for it's own sake) requires commitment and bravery. Too often, however, their innovative ideas become co-opted by brands who want an 'edgy' ad. Still, you've got to make a living.

I also recieved a really interesting message from a 'Maya Master' - for those who don't know what that is, see here . He was really disillusioned with the compartmentalisation of the CG industry (you generally specialise in lighting, rigging, modelling etc...) and felt that the current state of the CG industry didn't faciliate independent creativity and experimentation.

So, despite the mauling, the thread had some interesting results.

Now I'm starting to consider posting examples of the work in the CG Society's gallery to fine artists to find out what they think. It'd probably be equally as controversial.

Digital Editioning

2008-06-05T15:24:00.009+01:00

Went to a gallery today - well, I say a gallery, what I actually saw was an outlet of Castle Galleries, which is the retail face of Washington Green Originals. Now, the clue to this puzzle is in the name - 'originals'. The gallery sells prints of various forms of artworks (including some by Pele) but they come in forms I'd never really encountered. Apart from the straighforward limitless print, they do limited edition prints, but also super high-quality prints on canvas. The first time I saw one of these, it was a pop-art piece by painter Sarah Graham. On first viewing, I noticed the razor sharp edges of the painting and thought to myself - 'she's just printed that on canvas and touched it up with paint'. Turns out, it had been entirely scanned and printed on canvas with such a high resolution that it looks like a painting (minus brushstrokes).

The most interesting thing was when the shop assistant told me about their 'atelier' products - limited edition prints that have been painted over with varnish to simulate the effect of an original painting. You could make out the texture of brushstrokes, yet they didn't correspond with any of the underlying forms. Apparently this is all done in-house (to the artist's exacting standards!) by Washington Green.

The shop had a few other tricks to mediate between the print and the original and some unique display conventions (free-floating invisible perspex box-mounted supersized embossed watercolour print of an Edward Monkton greeting card, anyone?), all examples of the strange devices used to bridge the profitable yet shady continuum between the one-off and the inifinitely reproducible.

Digital artists face similar issues to do with reproduction and editioning, yet editioning is second nature (obscure pun?) to the digital image - it's infinitely reproducible with little, if any, reduction in quality. Perhaps the default seriality of the digital image is the reason that digital artists are at turns either blissfully unaware or incredibly attuned to editioning. Either they release full-scale versions of their images onto the web or they produce one-off or small limited-edition runs of an image. In some cases they destroy the original file, though I think this is more of a unwritten contract than an actual practice. But what really interests me is the way that in the case of digital images, source files can be tweaked and reissued as unique works. Take a scene created in a 3D application, for example: the artist could change the position of the camera before rendering, each time producing a work with significant visual difference. Yet each render would essentially be a version of the same 'original'.

Perhaps the digital image naturally treads the shady area between original and reproduction, though I have to admit it's all got me foxed at the moment. Is there any precedent for digital editioning?

Today's project: 'Picket Lines'

2008-06-04T22:22:00.006+01:00

This is an image I've been working on for a couple of days. It should have only taken about 3 hours but it was a voyage of exploration.

Al and Al

2008-06-03T11:00:00.006+01:00

I've been looking into the work of Al and Al, two video artists who work with CG and who recently exhibited their film Eternal Youth in Liverpool as part of the European Capital of Culture festival.

You can see the whole of their film Interstella Stella here. It's a disorienting mix of bluescreened live action, digital video, CG environments and raw-looking postprocessing. They use the both low-poly look of video games but fuse it with the high-poly look of high end film. The stylistic mashup does away with any sense of cohesion, but begins to define a type of CG experimentation that I'm sure will be reproduced in years to come.

I thought it seemed like a deconstructed Grand Theft Auto and that it's references toward gaming were especially evident in the use of character point-of-view cameras. I wasn't particularly drawn in by the story (it's more of a visual sculpture than a story, very reminiscent of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2). What really grabbed me was the way cameras, lights and screens were littered throughout the strange urban twilight of the CG landscape. At times, the cameras were seen to track the main characters, but at times they remained in the background, perhaps filming another scene - a scene already passed or yet to come. The suggestion of multiple viewpoints in turn suggests multiple viewers, many stories, many agencies. Do the cameras represent virtual viewpoints, webcams, CCTV cameras, character POVs? Or some fusion of one or more of these? Who is watching and what involvement might they have with the story?

This prompted me to consider how the film approaches ideas of storytelling, truth and linearity/non-linearity. Interstella Stella seems somehow out of time. With all these cameras set up, the story could be told in a different configuration, to different audiences, in different places at different times. Which is probably not so different to the way a videogame works, but somehow Al and Al fuse the branching storylines of a game world with the fixed momentum of the narrative film - yet at the same time they do away with the goal-oriented nature of games as well as the narrative constrictions of film.

Which either leaves us with nothing, or a big 'ol heap of something interesting.

Take a look at the remnants of their stolen back-catalogue.

Talking CGI conference

2008-06-02T22:11:00.004+01:00

Found this link yesterday - it's a film and summary of a conference organised for the Arts and Humanities Board ICT Methods Network (defunct as of March 31st).

The video basically shows four guys in black chatting about CGI technology, techniques, aesthetics and so on.

What I liked were the sentiments of Johnny Hardstaff, who offered a more critical perspective on the effects of CGI. An excerpt from the Panel Report:

"Using deliberate provocateurs like ‘advertising is the artillery of CGI’, and suggesting CGI is the corporate language in ‘scripting reality’, Hardstaff opened up the ideological issues embedded in computer animation aesthetics. Hardstaff, though readily admitting to being seduced by the potential of the applications, was concerned that the easy spectacle or photorealist precision afforded by digital technologies would produce a lack of questioning by audiences, or challenge to audiences. His own work, therefore – often a re-contextualization of established visual idioms – seeks to offer subversive imagery as a model of undermining the corporatization of contemporary visual culture."

He went to art school, naturally.

He also mentioned Al and Al, who seem worth a look.

Paint, Pixels and Glitches

2008-06-02T21:04:00.005+01:00

The alleged remark of Paul DeLaroche upon seeing the first primitive photographs ("From today, painting is dead.") acts as a historical bookmark for the subsequent chapters of painting. After the invention of the photograph, painters began to explore the qualities of paint itself - they asked themselves what painting could do that photography couldn't. So they began to interpret light as paint, see forms in terms of brushstrokes and channel the more abstract sensations the eye could produce: painting became a playful, visceral, intellectual, emotional response to the world, rather than a neutral photographic copy of it. In short, painters began to embrace the physical qualities of paint. What could it do? They explored markmaking - dots, lines, sprays, dribbles, smears. They tried different applications - thin, thick, flat, impasto. They tried different supports: plastic, newpaper, cardboard, skin. Through their failure to reproduce photographic respesentation, paintings began to have a dialogue with their own means of production.

And so to the digital image.

From some paints of view, digital images possess an even greater possibility for tyrannising 'the real' than photography ever did. It's partly this power that draws me towards the failings of the digital - the ghost in the machine, so to speak. The main drawback of raster images (and any rendered digital image in general) is the fallibility of the pixel. Consider the wider lifespan of a pixel - what happens to it? What does it do? In the case of digital photography, the pixels that make up an image are affected by a host of unseen factors, such as geometric raster distortions, signal to noise ratio caused by low levels of radiation, scanning frequency and image matrix size. When assessing the character of digital images, we could also consider the effect of compression, optimisation and artefaction and the unforseen but intriguing effects of image corruption.

Which leads me to Glitch Art, and databending.

The many faces of 'Digital Art'

2008-05-30T17:44:00.005+01:00

I've been giving some thought to the remit of this blog - I'm aware that I've used the terms CGI and 3D to describe what many people would call 'digital art'. So I thought I'd try and clarify what exactly it is that interests me. Suffice to say, it's not digital art, or any of it's popular synonyms - 'new media', 'multi-media' or 'computer art'.

Here's a link to a tag cloud widget thing from the digital arts website Rhizome. Take a look and you'll see how vaguely the term 'digital art' is applied. I've no urge to impose order on this wonderful, sprawling mess, but I do find it interesting that so many practitioners of digital art seem to overlook the relation it has to the lineage of traditional art forms.

Anyway, until the dust from a trillion pixels settles on the art world, I can content myself with the idea that on the simplest level, an image will always be an image, whether or not it sings, dances or interacts with me. That's why this blog has as it's remit the exploration of those who make images using digital techniques. Keep it simple.

Though that might change, you never know.

Technicians vs. Artists

2008-05-29T16:41:00.000+01:00

I was recently lucky enough to win a place on a 3 month 3D VFX course at Escape Studios. It’s a great place to study, and it managed to get me out of my unrewarding job in e-learning. But since then, I’ve been languishing somewhat, trying to integrate the mass of 3D skills I learnt into a fine art context (which I studied here).

While I was at Escape Studios, it became pretty clear that I was training to be a technician, rather than an artist. I’m not bitter about this at all (who would be? - free training!) it’s just that in the CGI industry, the people who know how to use the software are not the people that come up with the ideas. That’s down to the director. And the director only makes films/games/ads that’ll make money, so you’re unlikely to find a director trying out something strange or risky when there‘s millions of studio dollars at stake.

The whole industry is geared towards improving the level of realism (interesting article here) and the thus the technology is developed accordingly. So it’s pretty great when someone with huge technical expertise stretches the software in a different direction, like Chris Landreth, whose animated documentary Ryan won an Oscar in 2004. You can find out a bit more about it here.

The film is driven by ideas, not technology. He calls the style 'psychorealism' (there we go with the realism thing again!). The best thing about this film is how Landreth has avoided convention in almost all respects - the story doesn’t flow normally, we don’t have a hero, there’s no 3-point lighting, he fuses the tools (hair, paint effects, particles) in weird combinations, the animation is jerky and pretty much anti-Disney. Judging from this article, he was essentially attempting to break the software. Which is a good thing, by the way.

CGI: hyperreality

2008-05-28T20:33:00.000+01:00

I ended my post yesterday by suggesting that when we look at these two images, we don’t feel we’re getting a report from the real world. I thought that this was due to the clarity of the images - their lack of 'noise'. Yet their intense clarity still suggests a reality, just perhaps not the one we’re used to seeing.

Demand’s complex practice provides much material for art critics, because it seems to question so many of the preconceptions about photography. His process is particularly unique, and provides us with an almost perfect example of hyperrealism in practice.

Consider this definition of hyperreality, by self-confessed hyperrealist (great to have that on your CV, huh?) Dennis Peterson:

“By process, Hyperrealism often takes a reality, substitutes a false simulation of it, then improves the false image beyond reality itself.”

Demand uses found photographs, creates models from them, photographs the models and destroys the original. Reality twice removed, and in its place a seemingly neutral, photoreal depiction of the lost original. The photograph serves as the most concrete evidence of the existence of it’s subject matter - a subject matter that now seems more remote than the photograph itself. So, Demand filters ‘reality’ through these prisms to create a hyperreal 'original' version of itself, as seen in Embassy 1.

As I’ve already suggested, La Mairie shares many visual and conceptual qualities with the processed, filtered reality of Embassy 1. Yet, crucially, HenFre's CG model shows us an essentially ‘raw’ state - a basic, unprocessed model, itself a ‘false simulation of reality’. So, perhaps the starting point for a CG model such as La Mairie is hyperreality - a sharpened, clarified version of a non-indexical source.

...

CG Fine Art Goldmine

2008-05-28T11:16:00.000+01:00

I've still got some more thinking to do regarding the previous post, but in the meantime I've stumbled across a goldmine of cgi fine art imagery courtesy of artist Gerhard Mantz.

I was quite surprised to find so many amazing examples of Fine Art CG, by highly regarded artists. I guess one of the main concerns I had about CG + Fine Art was that any artists exploring such an intersection may find it difficult to enter into the traditional discourse of image production, especially painting. I guess I'm being proved wrong. Which is great - at least I've got plenty to write about now!

Don't you love it when you've been googling for days to find something and you suddenly find a link that opens up a world of names and search terms? It's like clicking the right square in minesweeper.

CGI: too-real or not-real-enough?

2008-05-27T17:14:00.001+01:00

Low Polygon model of La Mairie, Etaples, originally uploaded by HenFre.

I found the image above (Low Polygon model of La Mairie, Etaples, by HenFre.) whilst doing a mammoth search for CGI images on Flickr yesterday. It reminds me of the work of Thomas Demand and James Casabere, two artists (of many) who photograph exact miniature models of buildings. Demand's Embassy 1 is reproduced below.

The similarities between HenFre's La Mairie and Demand's Embassy 1 are interesting. The process used is surprisingly similar: Demand builds intricate realistic miniatures, lights his model, composes the shot and sets up a camera. No doubt HenFre undertook a similar procedure using Maya, Lightwave or 3d Studio Max.

But it's the relationship each of these images has to ideas of reality, photography and clarity that interests me the most.

Demand attempts to 'do' realism to a certain degree, but his photograph gives away the fact that the building is a model - it's somehow too perfect, airbrushed - a dictionary-definition of an Embassy. The Embassy seems slightly removed from reality. Rather than being a depiction of an actual building, with it's notches, marks and imperfections, Demand's photograph is an idealised example of that building. The same could be said of La Mairie - for whatever purpose it is eventually put to, it currently looks toyish - like a model example of a building - the sort of generic image that comes to mind when we're asked to imagine 'town hall'.

It's perhaps, unusually, the clarity of Demand's image that gives it away: it seems to be an assumption within image production that clarity in an image is synonymous with quality. And, in turn, that a good-quality image brings us closer to an accurate depiction of reality. But in the case of Embassy 1, the role of clarity in realism seems less straightforward.

This clarity - quality - reality relationship is especially true for CGI. Within the film, television and print industry, a CG model like La Mairie would likely become much more complex and detailed the closer it got to a final render. Replicating the fine detail of reality is, broadly speaking, the overriding aim of VFX production. However, if La Mairie found it's way into a film or ad campaign, it would be 'graded' - another layer of photographic texture (graininess, for example) would be added to match the live-action backplate, effectively adding noise to the image to make it seem more 'real'.

The same grain or 'noise' is exactly what is removed from Demand's model of the Embassy, thus giving it a sense of 'clarity'. Consider a photograph of the actual Embassy, from the same perspective. It's unlikely that the photograph would capture the detail of the hairline cracks and mottled texture of the plasterwork. Such details would be lost to the grain of the film. What Demand achieves with the model and subsequent photograph of the Embassy, is to eliminate those details that a photograph of the actual Embassy could not reproduce. However, in doing so, he reveals the strained relationship between photography and the representation of reality: Embassy 1 raises our suspicions regarding it's authenticity precisely because of it's clarity. Demand therefore executes a neat double-hander - he attempts to eliminate the shortcomings of photography but in doing so, he earns our distrust. The conclusion being, our belief in photographic realism relies on the fact that photographs obscure detail: they lack clarity.

Embassy 1 and Low Polygon model of La Mairie, Etaples have one very obvious thing in common - their un-photographic clarity. But interestingly, each image comes from an opposite starting point in order to attain that clarity - Embassy 1 has 'upgraded' the photographic process by attempting to erase noise. Low Polygon model of La Mairie appears to us before it is 'downgraded' by recieving noise.

So, two images - one that is yet to be downgraded to the photographic in order to seem real, and one that has been upgraded from the photographic and had the real removed from it. But both images retain a sense of sharp, pressing reality - perhaps hyper-reality?

More to follow....

'Sweet' by Nick Knight

2008-05-27T12:15:00.001+01:00

Here's a great place to start: an animation by fashion photographer Nick Knight. Knight used a 3d scanner to capture high-density scans of models wearing (what looks like) sweet wrappers, doilies and christmas decorations. It's a cute film, with a nice soundtrack, and a kind-of broken doll feel to it.

All well and good. But what Knight hadn't realised is that the foil from the sweet wrappers would interfere with the 3d scanner: the reflective material caused the machine to malfunction: the resultant mesh is full of anomalies - areas where the models heads have been eaten away or appear to explode.

What I found funny was the account of how the technicians running the machine immediately wanted to clean up the mesh to remove the anomalies - something they're used to doing. Of course, as you can see in from the film, the meshes stayed as they were: imperfect, unexpected, and unusual. Not often you get that in CGI.

Can CGI be Fine Art?

2008-05-27T11:41:00.000+01:00

There's probably lots of artists out there, both CG and traditional, who believe that their work straddles the two disciplines of fine art and computer generated imagery.

I won't debate that just yet (give me time, though, and I'm coming after you guys! ;-) However, I do believe that CGI lacks experimentation. This is one of the things I'll be looking at - experimental CGI: what happens when the tools break, when the render kicks up something unexpected, when a unique CG artist comes along looking to do something new and different.
I'm also interested in how CGI might engage with some of the issues that affect contemporary painting - representation, realism, expression, markmaking, colour.

I'll also be looking at the issue from the other side of the divide: how contemporary painters, printmakers or photographers use or reference CGI. I'm not talking about all those thousands of fine artists who have just discovered Photoshop and go crazy with filters and layers: this way does not lie innovation. I'm interested in artists who have an understanding of the potential of CGI and how it might affect and change the issues of fine art just as photography and film did so a hundred years ago.

Here goes.