3D
PRESENCE
4 practitioners reflect on how 3D imaging technologies construct the notions of presence and absence in a chain of images with each image created, generated, or found within 30 minutes.


Collaboration participants:

Aron Spall, artist, PhD candidate; Sheffield Hallam University

Jamie Yeates, academic, Interior Architecture and Design lecturer, Arts University Bournemouth

Ksenia Kopalova, illustrator, illustration educator, researcher; Arts University Bournemouth

Paul Roberts, illustration educator, academic;
Arts University Bournemouth
As this is the first image it could dictate a direction too much, so I spent a little longer considering options. Having had a list of a few options, such as including a figure or moving image, more abstract, more or less '3d', I went for this, thinking it is hopefully open enough that many different types of responses and approaches might emerge. Also because it is not too polished and 'worked on' but more of a grab.
ARON SPALL:

JAMIE YEATES:


I used the point cloud visualiser addon for Blender to add a node tree to Aron’s file. This method works well because it creates a shader that uses the original colours. I am interested in how the point cloud information can be sculpted, manipulated, dissolved, or added to. Maybe multiple point clouds potentially sharing one shader. I don’t fully understand the nodes I have used; as you can see, it can be a bit hit-and-miss.

I built on Jamie's node setup in Blender, but wanted to bring back some of the organic themes in Aron's work. Still trying to refine some of the rendering, but felt I should stop before getting too picky. I recommend altering the shaders if you want to play as the subsurface setting can boost render times - best to turn off if you are having trouble with the file.
PAUL ROBERTS:
It's a public domain image of various bacteria from a 1899 atlas.I was thinking about the conventions of scientific illustration and scale: when 3d-modified, the forest turns into a microorganism, which speaks about invisible presence (of some translucent funky-yucky creatures).

I was interested in colours, and how those are used to represent microorganisms: this may not be the case with bacteria, but with viruses we apply colour imaginatively, and 3D or 2D representations of these invisible lifeforms are always speculative and fictionalised in some way.

In this particular archival image I was also interested in how presence is also articulated as the presence of the scientist - through the visibility of the 'eye' of a microscope.
KSENIA KOPALOVA:

ARON SPALL:


This is a macular map of my eye. Following on from Ksenia’s bacteria images I followed the thinking of scale and scientific conventions of visualising data. There was also the circular shapes of the illustrations. Together they led me to this video I recorded of the machine that scanned the back of my eye. I’m interested in these cameras and the images they produce.


There is one called Optical Coherence Tomography: OCT Scan, that scans the eye in 3d, enabling them to turn the scan and see layers of the eye from different perspectives.


The other image is a still from a video of a scan of landscape in the Peak District. It’s the ground covered in heather. There is something in the eye scan that reminded me of it, the layering, movement and fragility. I liked the shift in scale again and thinking about the scanning process at these very different scales and for such very different purposes.

I went to BBC Earth Experience, London, on Tuesday, and I have been thinking about the way people interact with visual information. So, I increased scale for an immersive experience of the speculative microorganisms with fictional colouring. It’s like walking around inside of Aron’s eye! I used a combination of Adobe Fresco, Procreate, and Photoshop.
JAMIE YEATES:
What excited me in Jamie's image is the association of humans with microorganisms. Imagining an eye inhabited by humans is a fascinatingly disturbing idea. It made me think about human presence as invasive, and I changed the scale again, recalling the satellite shots of the 'eye' of Mirny mine in the Republic of Sakha.
The red image was taken with ASTER, Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer - hence quite a notable (menacing!) colour palette of remote sensing through machine vision. Here's a link to the NASA website with more info about the image.

KSENIA KOPALOVA:
Taking Ksenia's mapping approach, and following a discussion about channels and information contained with such images, I used Dream textures AI to create a new map (left image). This was then run through various processes in Blender in order to split the colour channels and use these to disrupt the map.
PAUL ROBERTS:
I really like the bold colours in Paul's second image, and I want to capture the feel of topography and contours from Ksenia's post. Paul's animations reminded me of shock waves, making me think of possible narratives. However, I have gone with a wiry marshland — a glimpse of the surviving landscape following the shock wave.

This week I've been sculpting with clay and bending, twisting, and cutting aluminium wire to make an armature to recreate the wire effect digitally using Blender's Grease Pencil.

JAMIE YEATES:
The idea for this came from the movement between scales, and between landscapes and bodies in the last few steps. The Eames 'Powers of Ten' came to mind - I've always loved that film. So I've taken an internet image of 8 frames from the film and replaced the images with bits of images that i've made in the past. I chose images that somewhat related to ones in the film, e.g. the body lying in the sun and the hand, or most of them because they had an aesthetic feel that seemed slightly credible for the scale.

There is zero science behind any of it! But I liked the idea of thinking about (invented) material qualities of digital images at these extremes of scale. It is a playing with, and repurposing of, digital fragments whose spatial characteristics have all come about through various types of digital scanning of real world objects, landscapes and bits of body.
ARON SPALL:
I was interested in the apparatus of vision, specifically related to the questions of scale and magnification that Aron introduced above. I 'borrowed' a 3D model from sketchfab, re-textured it, and and begun to apply distorting effects with Geometry nodes. My initial thinking was related to the distortion that scale and magnification brings to a sense of the wider context (i.e. magnification at one scale distorts a sense of the surroundings, you lose focus at the edges of vision, or lose perspective), but I ended up being more interested in the visual effects that resulted from play rather than sticking to the concept rigorously. Thanks to Joel Lardner with whom I've been testing some of these techniques and who inspired the development of this process. Also thanks to Ksenia to remind me to look closer!

PAUL ROBERTS:
I was interested in the glitchy disappearing of the miscroscope in Paul's video. I'm simulateneously writing a paper about Polycam and its 'mistakes' and omissions, so somewhat hyperfocused on glitches now.

What I find interesting is how a glitch is a sort of a veil, that masks, hides, obscures, helps the object escape, and also - grants a certain 'safety' to the object, while simultaneously making it alluring.

In this image I'm hyperfocused on this veil, trying to capture disappearance - and maybe I'm more interested in the impossibility to capture the object, rather than the object itself.
KSENIA KOPALOVA:
I was seeing a connection between everybody’s contributions, the scaling up and down, in and out, the glitches connecting both at the same time. For my post the veil became a landscape again. A crumpled, paper landscape with a sun light from above and a red spotlight from above. After generating this render using a very simple shader node setup in blender, I then used Drawingbot to create a messy vector line interpretation.
JAMIE YEATES:
I’m seeing these as rhyming with Ksenia's pencil drawing and Jamie’s drawingbot.

I enjoy looking at the fragmented, broken structures of 3D scans when they're stripped of textures to reveal their messy, twisted, wireframes. I like the way they seem to be expressive, gestural and fragile. They are computational images created through machine vision but, especially from a distance their 'mistakes' can seem like expressive, almost human, gestures, allowing them to register as drawings / sketches.
ARON SPALL:
A somewhat tangential link between works - I saw in Aron's images a mixture of heroic characters and landscapes, reminding me of life drawings or classical paintings. At the same time I was playing with parallax textures and decided to combine the two. I borrowed Caspar David Friedrich's Abbey in the Oak Forest for this experiment (partially due to laziness).

I enjoy in the parallax effect the relation between the flat plane and its apparent recession into the space. The ghostly surface remains, whilst the actual image retreats.
PAUL ROBERTS: