Reading Reaction
I really loved this chapter from Hito Steyerl’s Duty Free Art. My head is still spinning from how many ideas and thinkers she packed into this writing, and I anticipate I’ll uncover more ideas as I sit with the piece longer. However, the main thing I takeaway from this excerpt now is the idea that surfaces and surface level analysis have a greater revelatory potential than images.
Steyerl writes, citing Siegfried Kracauer:
“For [Kracauer], the surface was all that needed to be looked at in order to diagnose the present. It presented an unmediated expression of the social unconscious. Kracauer insists… ‘The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things.’”
This idea resonates with me so much in our age of digital deceit. I have to question every text and image I see, and I cannot trust any amount of authority from anybody since most credibility in our institutions have crumbled. So much more can be gleaned from the unsaid, the poses people take, what the 3D body and world inadvertently depicts and contains. The challenge with interpreting facts, news, and anything is pairing context and motivation from what source is distributing information, especially since sources and information have destabilized at quicker rates than before. 3D scanning/3D space has all the context by necessirty. 3D is pure context and that’s where meanings generate most effectively now.
Backgrounds are whole worlds. The “background” is often what power is trying to obfuscate and where real power operates: in the shadows, in facilities tucked away in the countryside (data centers, prisons, black sites, etc), in things abstracted away from the general eye, where deals are made, peace talks are brokered (the section on Bosnia and Serbia using PowerScene could be a whole essay).
This idea of 3D generating the most meaningful knowledge of an epoch inspires me to keep working in 3D for web interfaces and in my art practice. Building a world reveals so much more than any one piece of dialogue, statement, opinion can bludgeon. Multiplicity is a strength of 3D art, and I believe the connective power of 3D space can morph 3D spaces from gimmick into enlightening works.
3D scan with Experimental Lighting
In class last week, I helped Jacob and Kea with their scanning using the Stage Lights in the Black Box Media Commons.
I haven’t gotten a chance to edit the video myself yet.
Also, I shoot footage for my Voyag3R performance in the Garage this past week. I will begin 3D scanning and editing the splats for my Voyag3R website this week!
Ryan Rotella 
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