ARCHIVING PAPER ARTEFACTS:
PHYSICAL BODY/ DIGITAL SURFACE
Project curator+3D tinkerer:
Ksenia Kopalova

Illustrators:
Woodley Jones
D'Island Sampson Gordon
Lily Smith
Cover image: Woodley Jones and Ksenia Kopalova
The physical and the digital have a long history of being juxtaposed. Considering this tension, how can we archive paper artefacts made by illustrators and artists digitally?

Three illustrators - Woodley Jones, D'Island Sampson, and Lily Smith - created paper artefacts and allowed another illustrator, Ksenia Kopalova, to 3D-scan them and see how 3D-scanning can participate in a digital archive of such objects.

How would these objects transform? How would this archive treat these transformations? And what would that mean for how we define a digital archive, and, specifically, paper artefacts created by artists?

WHERE'S THE TENSION?

PAPER ARTEFACTS:
  • Associated with craft and manual labour
  • Carry weight, density, texture, smell – physical and affective qualities irreducible to sight


Artwork by Woodley Jones
BOTH PAPER ARTEFACTS AND 3D MODELS:
  • Ephemeral
  • Provisional
  • Intimate/individual in the way they are interacted with
  • Difficult to preserve and archive

A mesh of the 3D-scan of Woodley's work, by Ksenia

SO WHAT WOULD ALLOW ONE TO AVOID THE PHYSICAL/DIGITAL BINARY?

1/SURFACE

2/EXPERIENCE

SURFACE IS MALLEABLE.

Physical paper as a surface can be folded, torn apart, drawn on, burnt, cut – i.e. it can transmute.

So can digital surface: the 3D mesh can be stretched, extended, modified into any other shape.
Artwork by Lily Smith

EXPERIENCE IS REAL.

Why should we diminish the digital to 'representations' (echoes, shadows, reflections), when the experience of the digital is real in its consequences?

Artwork by D'Island Sampson Gordon

WHAT AND WHO DEFINES THE TRANSFORMATIONS?

This type of movement could be applied to any model, but it wouldn’t work the same with other models. There is a degree of authorial control over the type of movement, and whether this control is exercised by the artists themselves, curatorial, or collaborative decisions, is subject to negotiation.

WHAT DEFINES THE DEGREE OF SPECULATION/DEVIATION FROM THE PHYSICAL FORM?

What would distinguish an archive of paper artefacts from a game is the role of the paper objects. The narrative, whatever it develops into, should still keep them central: as living organisms, protagonists, key interface elements, narrative-specific environments.

Other than that there is no reason to make a distinction between a game and an archive: favouring documental quality results in still-born ‘digital galleries’ that simply puts photography or its extensions into a clunky interface replicating the white cube.

WHAT ABOUT THE GLITCHES?

3D-scanning creates new objects, they do not need to attempt to be accurate representations of the physical prototypes – at least when it comes to artworks.

The interaction with the digital objects should not seek to replicate physical experience – sensations of touch, smell, texture, weight. Instead, it needs to embrace the specifics of 3D: weightlessness, sizelessness, and thus almost limitless malleability.

THE DIGITAL ARCHIVES OF ARTWORKS STILL COMMIT TO THE FICTION OF DOCUMENTAL ACCURACY

An archive of paper artefacts, - objects ephemeral, provisional, fragile, and hence transformable, - needs to embrace these qualities.

HOW WOULD YOU MODERATE SUCH ARCHIVES, IF THEY ARE TRANSFORMED BY THE USERS?

Well, maybe you wouldn't. It’s difficult enough to engage with it already – with 3D this has always been the proficiency threshold that does the moderation. But more importantly, maybe having the opportunity to engage is in itself more important than actually using it.

Bibliography


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