Resolution - Eidetic Solipsism

PROLOGUE

Moving forward with this unit, I took note of all the things that I want to leave behind with the Independent Practice project, and things I want to carry forward into the Resolution one.

I feel that the fact that I had a clear idea of what my final piece was going to be from the very beginning held me back a little. At the time I saw it as a positive thing because I had clear goals that I could set out to achieve, but it stopped me from evolving the project and gathering other inspiration from other practitioners and theorists. I think that moving forward I should strip things back to the basics, perhaps remove the idea of the playable experience and just focus on the strategies I developed in the previous projects and find out what they can do together in other ways. I know that I said that I didn't just want to make flat prints of photographs for my final piece, but my computer doesn't seem to be able to run the VR test demos I make in Unreal anyway, so I might need to back track a little and make something else anyway. I have also been told in my feedback for the last unit that I could have been a little more analytical, and that I need to test things to a set of objectives, rather than just seeing if it looks cool or not. I think that before I didn't really know what to expect from the programs I was using so the tests only consisted of trying it out for the first time, but now I know what to look for I can create a list of objectives to test them against.

In terms of what I want to bring into this unit - since I've reluctantly decided to scrap the VR experience idea, the only things I want to bring forth are the strategies I employed, and the drive I had to test new things out.

The concept of me starting again is a little scary to me, but it really isn't the end of the world. I can still employ the 3D data from Google Maps, including eeriness and unsettling feelings, and even VR. It was suggested to me that I could also employ the VR headset as a tool to create the work, rather than to view it. The headset that I own can take screenshots, so I can view a 3D models and take "photos" of them with my window into the digital realm. I do enjoy this idea. It reminds me of when I was younger wishing that I could take photographs with my eyes, visiting places and trying to cement what I saw in my brain, essentially taking a snapshot. Since the VR headset becomes your new eyes, the screenshot feature feels like a dream come true. This venture is fairly exciting to me, as I could employ ideas surrounding classical photography (sublime landscape, portraiture, street photography, architectural photography, etc.) but utilising 3D models and my headset camera.

The Oculus Quest 2 (the headset I own) also have two cameras on the front of the device, so that it can track your hands in 3D space, making it so that you don't need controllers. I haven't found a way to use them yet, but if I do then I will definitely play around with them a little.

Another technical difficulty I've been having is my mental health. I'm not sure how appropriate it is to talk about this stuff here, but it has seriously been affecting my work. I sometimes feel so desolate and that everything is pointless, even though I know it isn't. I'm barely eating or sleeping, and to make it all worse my girlfriend broke up with me in the beginning of March. I have moments (like this one) where I have enough energy to do something productive but they seem to be so far and in between that I can't really rely on a random bursts of motivation anymore or nothing will get done. I've become a bit of a master procrastinator too, where my brain knows that doing work will result in feelings of dread, guilt, worthlessness, and disappointment so I subconsciously avoid it until it becomes too big and scary to ignore anymore. It's a workflow that I've struggled but managed to keep up with the whole time I've been at university, but I really do feel as if my work's quality suffers for it. I've practically left everything up until 4 weeks of the deadline, but I've never struggled as much as this while trying to do a uni project at the same time before.

ROAD TRIP IDEA

Throughout my third year, I've been exploring google maps as an artistic tool and seeing what people have done with it has been really inspirational for me. I've explored Jon Rafman's work, and I've been playing a lot of GeoGuessr over the easter break. But, I think I've come up with an idea that could be fun and lucrative.

First of all, a huge part of Jon Rafman's 9Eyes that I've been interested in is image appropriation. Google Maps is an endeavour to create a utilitarian and informational website full of stunning 360 degree photographs. The images aren't meant to be appreciated as art, but appropriation is wonderful in that it can take something not meant to be admired and re-contextualises it and changes the way people look at it so that it can be considered artistic. Rafman's 9Eyes is a great example of this because it crops and removes certain events that the artist considered to be humorous, taking it out of the context of a tool used to plan driving routes and replacing it with the context of art. I found a piece of software called Street View Download 360, which, obviously, allows you to rip 360 degree images from the Google Maps website. First of all, you need to place yourself down in Streetview, copy the link into the software to produce a photo ID code, then paste that code in the Download Panorama section, and hit download.

HOW THE SOFTWARE WORKS: https://www.newtonscannon.com/2014/01/26/capturing-spherical-scenes-from-google-streetview/

GUIDELINES ON USING GOOGLE MAPS IMAGES FAIRLY: https://about.google/brand-resource-center/products-and-services/geo-guidelines/

Examples I downloaded from the Street View Download 360

In terms of testing this software out to a set of objectives, I only really needed it to collect the photographs, which it did quickly and effectively. My thing with appropriation is that I'm more fond of transformative kinds than just straight recontextualisation. To use Jon Rafman's 9Eyes as an example again, There is a little bit of the artist in the work. Jon had to spend hours going on "walks" trying to find the things that he submits to the projects, and he crops them himself and presents them as comedic. The other end of the scale that I'm not as much of a fan of is where they just take the object or image and leave it as it is, but give it a title or put it in a specific environment to lazily change the meaning of the object. As groundbreaking and theoretically interesting Marcel Duchamp's readymades are, It doesn't take much work, and there is very little self expression in it. I do appreciate how the readymades take industrially produced utilitarian objects (like the urinal for example) and grant it the status of art through the process of selection and presentation, but I think it needs to go a little further than that.

Google Maps is used to plan out routes between a desired point A and point B, so I thought that I could bring a little bit of the original context to this little experiment. I picked my home in my home town as point A, and my home at uni at point B, and got the route. Then, I went into street view, and began the journey. I copied the URL of the beginning of the journey, and pasted it into a word document. Then, I took a step forward, and repeated the process until I made it all the way there. My plan is to create a 360 degree animation that takes you on a road trip between the two houses. I've made this trip many times myself and there is a lot of tension and emotion that runs through me as I sit in the passenger seat and watch the world fly by. Most of the time the car is full of my belongings as we move my things, and there is a lot of homesickness and missing friends that that car journey fills me with. Because each frame is a 360 degree image, I will potentially be able to upload it to YouTube and view it with my VR headset. The video will then wrap around my headset, and it'll hopefully feel like I'm flying down the road myself. The real life journey takes around 2 hours to complete with a car, and this process took a lot longer to do manually. I tried to find software that could do this for me, and I did find a few, but they all require a paid Google API code. It took ____ hours overall, with ____ images downloaded, taking up ____GB worth of space. The next step in the plan was to take every photograph and put it into a video editing software, so that I could begin to sequence them. I made each image 1 frame long, and hit play.

After reading the guidelines that Google uploaded, I found that they would prefer it if you didn't take their images and repurpose them. They also said that I may submit a request, so I sent them an email asking their permission. If they say no I'll probably do it anyway, and I'll take the video down when they start paying taxes.

So... they never got back to me. I'm taking this as a sign to put my efforts elsewhere. It was taking me days just to take a step, take the url down and repeat the process before I even got halfway, and I didn't even manage to download any of them because I was running out of file space. Here we go, another idea I don't have time for now but would like to put some time into doing in the future.

LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY - IN PRACTICE

As I've mentioned before, place and location is a very common theme in photography. If this genre of photography is to be pertinent to the project that I'm doing, then I feel that it is very important that I read up about Landscape Photography. I mean, I know what it is - images taken of geography (either human or natural), but I've never really sat down to understand the theory behind it. Why do you choose a specific area to photograph? What should I look for? How do I compose my shot?

I picked up a book a while ago in an Oxfam titled: "Landscape Photography in Practice", by Axel Brück. I really enjoyed it, because even though it presumes the gender of every hypothetical human it makes up as male, it made it very clear several times that this wasn't an instruction manual, nor is it a list of things to do every time you go on a shoot. It's a book full of things to stimulate your thinking, to make you think about aspects of shooting that you might not have thought of before. I picked out all the sections that I thought related to what I was doing (like excluding where it talks about cameras or having to wake up early to get the perfect amount of sun), and started reading.

One thing that I found interesting in this book is that it talks about how a big theme in a lot of landscape photography is the absence of humans. You can of course have people in the image if they add something to it but more often than not our human brains will relate to and look at the face in the image first and the most strongly, which can take away from what you intended the image to say. The way that I am "taking" landscape "photographs" makes it that there are no people, which is why I was so interested in this point. Because there are people everywhere naturally, not seeing anyone in a frame instils a feeling of peace, or tranquility. I think it might be interesting to see if I can juxtapose this in my work, where instead of taking people out of the frame where they naturally would be, I could insert people into the image where they physically couldn't be, the digital realm. Perhaps this could instil a sense of chaos or claustrophobia. On the other hand, adding humans to my images could also enhance the emotionality of the image, as we could see a face and react strongly to it.

The book also talks about how a good landscape image isn't just in the thing you take a picture of. "I am assuming that the secret lies buried in the personality of the photographer rather than in the picture itself or in the landscape on its own". This is because a landscape wouldn't be anything without a personality like us to perceive it. And a landscape isn't a mountain, or a city, it's a human experience. It provokes all the sensory memories from experiences that you had with the landscape, and that is what we are reacting to when we take or look at a landscape image. We don't take in the entire landscape in 1/125ths of a second like a camera does either, we take our time with it, flitting our eyes from feature to feature, forming our own experience of it. Landscape photography aims to capture and preserve these perceptions and memories. "The photographer always sees more in his photograph than anybody else can, because he more or less automatically relates it to his experience of the landscape depicted". This whole 'memory' experience is purely individual though, as we humans haven't mastered mind reading yet. If I want my work to carry these thoughts and feelings though, I should be strong clear with them. I don't want it to be glaringly obvious or in your face but if the experience that I want people to understand is completely individual, I must get people to understand me in other ways. In summary of this point, the landscape isn't a static "object out there", it is an event that takes place in the photographer's mind, said event consists of the concrete situation, which cannot be repeated and the photographer's personality, which is unique as well, and it cannot be assumed that a third person, a viewer, can see or recognise the above in a photograph. If you succeed in removing these obstacles, the book says you will produce a good landscape photograph.

Going back to the point where landscape photographs are extremely personal, when you capture a landscape you are also capturing your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ideas. This probably explains the ominous, distorted, and confusing angle I've subconsciously taken with my work. I've been spiralling mentally for a few months now, and I think it's become evident in my work. If I want this to come across though, I must be clearer so that I can be understood.

An interesting point that this book made is that taking photographs doesn't exactly equate to capturing reality. The choice of what to focus on, depth of field, or even just the act of choosing to point your camera at one thing and omitting the other is an act of manipulation, transforming what is in front of you into an idea rather than a physical subject. It also makes the interesting and very true statement about othering. You want to make sure that you don't pick somewhere that is different to where you live - somewhere you might consider exotic - because it doesn't have that same filter of novelty to the people that live there, and they won't get the desired feeling when looking at the image. Admiring things for being different can be a good thing, but it can also be separatory and it keeps differences far from each other. Anywhere can be a subject of a landscape, just so long as you have a deeper personal connection to it.

The latter half of the book talks about composition, and what to think about when you go shooting.

The point of view is an obvious one, for a camera always has one and will always take images from one, but I thought it was interesting to think about because I'm not using a camera, I'm taking screen captures instead. Also, since I'm in 3D software, I don't have to hike for hours to find the perfect shot. I could use this to create perspectives that we're not used to seeing in reality, and I could take images from locations that might be difficult for humans to get to in the first place.

For us humans, the horizon is always at eye level, no matter how high up or low down you go. Cameras are different however, because you can tilt it to get the horizon to go wherever you want. "because this yields a visual result that cannot exist within normal perception, the position of the horizon is a forceful element in the composition of your pictures and the impression that they make on the viewer, even if he does not respond to it consciously". The book also says that the "rule" of thirds isn't exactly a rule, but a guideline. There is no perfect place for something to sit in the frame. You can put anything anywhere so long as it gets your message across and helps achieve what you want to make. I think I'd like to mess around with the non-linear perspective idea and pit it against this point, to see if this "forceful" element of shifting the horizon around is strong or not.

It's also important to think about whether scale is important. You can put together the previous two points to generate a sense of scale, and changing each parameter to mess with the impression of perspective. The audience must be guided through this perspective rendering, because "the viewer cannot be guided by his memory when looking at the picture because the chances are that the scene is unfamiliar to him". You must generate clues and signifiers of scale, so that the audience can figure it out contextually. You can also choose to exclude these clues, creating your own impression of scale by purely photographic means. Because I'm in a 3D modelling software, I can literally affect the scale of a landscape, meaning that I can make things look as big or as small as I would like. I could also make some parts bigger that would normally be small, and vice versa.

"The landscape you want to transform into a photograph appeals to you for some particular reason. The idea is to show this appeal in a photograph so that it can be understood and appreciated by someone who looks at it". Photographs don't always need a foreground, some landscapes are remarkably featureless, like deserts for example. People think that there must be a foreground so that it frames the image, but if there isn't one you shouldn't invent one, as it changes the initial impression that the landscape leaves on people. Use what's already there. Landscape is more candid than set up usually anyway. The book says that images without a foreground "often look[s] unapproachable or inaccessible to the viewer". I disagree, as I think it will draw you further in, as there is now no barrier between you and the background. Seeing a clear image of a mountain, hill, or path without anything in the foreground would want to make me go up to them, and see what adventure they lead me to. I think that this would be interesting to play with, to see whether having something in the foreground really changes that much. "You perceive a landscape selectively, which a camera cannot do. If you were to look at a landscape for a period of time, just as a test, you would realise that there were many things in it that you had not noticed at first, although on the other hand, some relatively small details may have occupied your attention". Your eyes also don't take in all the information at once (like we discussed already), We go from feature to feature, piecing the photo together in our own way. This process is very personal and unique to every individual, and it's why the photographer might think one thing about their work and everyone else forms their own impression. "The photographer's task is to create a picture which conveys the same kind of feeling as his original response to the subject". The subject in the foreground (if I choose to have one) must emphasize the desired impression to give to people. "You can use anything as a foreground subject as long as it fits into the context of your idea and provides the viewer with a key to understanding your photograph". I think that this idea is key to choosing what goes in the foreground. If I'm trying to get my emotions across, then put something that reflects it in the foreground. It isn't exactly being too obvious about it, you're just strategically placing it so that someone might look at it first, helping to shape their experience of the overall piece.

It's also important to think about how detailed the image is - whether it has a lot of negative space or whether it's packed with intricacies. A lot of negative space could emphasize the parts where there is some detail but could also make the image look too empty, whereas a lot of detail could provide the audience with a lot of visual material to look at, but it could make the image too busy, and too many subjects can muddy the water and take away from the effectiveness of each one, it just depends on what you want. I feel as if this parameter would change with each shot as it's called for - one shot might benefit from feeling claustrophobic and messy whereas another shot might look better if the subject stood alone against the background. There is a trick that landscape photographers employ that implies the existence of detail where there isn't any that would possibly be useful for me. If there is an object in the foreground, you can see it in full detail. If there are many of that same object in the background as well, we obviously can't see them as well but our brain fills in the gap where we don't see any texture because we see it so clearly in the foreground. Our subconscious is saying that if they are the same object then they probably look the same too, and we can see one of them really well so this one would probably look like that one.

I think the most interesting thing that I took away from the book is how many things correlate with my work, but how it is so different contextually that it would be really cool to see the differences between them, and what that means for trying to get my message across. In regular landscape photography, you'd have to get up at a certain time of day, hope the weather is nice, travel to find the perfect shot, and what's there is what you get - you can't change the landscape, dummy. But with what I'm doing, I can pick every aspect of what the audience will see, right down to the lighting. I can also affect the very fabric of space, bending it to my will. There seems to be something very godlike to what I'm doing, which no landscape photographer has ever said before. I say that because it's been taken as a given that you'll never be able to change things about a landscape, how things are that day determines what your image will be like. I know that the screenshots aren't technically photographs (the textures in the 3D images are), but the theory still crosses over and I am able to make everything perfect to how I would like it. This allows me to get my message across far more clearly too, as I don't have to rely on what's in the image to reflect it, I can just change the 3D object to suit it better.

UPSETTING THE HORIZON

Test 1: messing with scale

With this batch of tests, I was messing around with scale - the metropolitan locations I've been picking are full of contextual clues as to how big everything is, as I'm sure everyone knows how big they are in relation to an average building. Plus, because these are city landscapes, if I employ a higher viewpoint (like in the image above), I automatically assume that we are high up, rather than seeing the 3D object as small. I've noticed that I also tried to test out the theory of detail in the foreground providing detail in the background. In the image above, the buildings in the foreground are similar to the ones in the background, and although we can't make out what the ones in the background actually look like, they look similar enough that we don't have to do the work.

I attempted to try the foreground detail idea with the above and below images, the trees and buildings providing context for each other.

I tried the scale tests with another location - Brighton Marina & Pier. No particular reason, other than I've been there before so I can recognise the area. When I ripped this 3D object, I was fairly zoomed out on Google Maps as to cover a larger area, but that results in lower detail in the textures and a lower polygon count. This is a trick to not have to use as much CPU when loading the entire Earth, because the file would be astronomically huge if it had to render the full quality object when you're all the way zoomed out. This has resulted in an interesting visual effect however. It has the same effect as Thomas Ruff's JPEG series, where because all the textures are so pixelated and the 3D mesh is so vague that when something is closer to the camera (as opposed to when you are closer to the print with Ruff's work, although distance would also help with figuring out these images) the more difficult it is to see what the image depicts, but the further something is to the camera the more the vague textures and models actually resemble what they are meant to. For the next few images, I picked a subject to place in the foreground (buildings, mostly) and I've enjoyed how there is a mess of pixels and lines on the bottom half but a suggestion of a city in the top. Even the parts that look like a city are still a little off, and the more you sit and pay attention to it the less it looks real and it starts to make less and less sense.

Test 2: forceful placement of horizon

I also looked at putting the horizon in different places in the frame. Unfortunately you can't affect the camera's z axis in Adobe Dimension and can't tilt it, so no dutch angles.

The middle horizon is pretty standard, and apart from the cars flattened to a mere texture in front of us, nothing looks out of place with the image.

The lower horizon immediately opens the image up, quietening an otherwise busy cityscape. These shots are sometimes reserved for when there is an enticing cloudscape in the sky, but because we're in a 3D modelling software, there's no such thing. I am able to place my own "sky" as an image but I am a fan of showing artefacts of the medium I'm using, like Brechtian theatre making it very clear that you are watching a play or a Kirsten Schrøder painting existing as an exploration of the brush stroke. I almost want to steer away from making clear renders of the images so I can take screenshots in Blender so I "accidentally" capture some of the UI in the final images. Anyway, despite the mundane subject in the photo above, the weight of the negative space over the detail mellows it out a bit, making it more still and tranquil.

Naturally, a higher horizon has the opposite effect to the lower one. Since the camera's gaze is cast towards a lot more detail - tossing out the negative space - the image looks a lot busier. I think that I was wrong with the thought that this perspective would make things look a little claustrophobic. While I'm sure you can achieve that effect this way, I've found that it just makes the frame more detailed. Since there isn't much to look at in the foreground on the above shot I think the eyes naturally rest on the horizon in the background anyway. Also, since people's experiences of a landscape are unique based on the sequential order that they looked at individual things in the shot, then perhaps you could engineer it a little better if there are fewer things in the frame. By placing the horizon near the bottom of the frame you are automatically leaving quite a lot out of the frame, meaning you can pick and choose what is shown a lot easier. On the other hand, I also think that certain shots require certain decisions, so if a shot looks better with a higher horizon I would go for that. Besides, as much as I want people to understand my thoughts and feelings and for them to get the work, my favourite part about art in general is that people are able to get their own pure individual idea about it. I wouldn't take that gift away from people just to get my point across.

Test 4: playing with amounts of detail in the image

Having a lot of detail in these kinds of images wasn't as messy or cramped as I thought they would be. In the above and below image, there is plenty of detail in each foreground, mid-ground, and background, and I like how they both are composed.

I found it difficult (at least with this 3D model of Maidstone) to find somewhere with not a lot of detail, but I took to the edge of the model where it cuts off. This makes the image (above and below) look like it's foreground and midground only, Even though these aren't supposed to look real, the exclusion of a background takes any realism that was left and gets rid of it. The background adds a lot of context as to where the image is, so without it it looks exactly like what it is - a 3D model. I think it's a similar effect to when we shift the horizon, humans aren't used to seeing the face of the earth drop off into the abyss so it looks a little strange when we see it depicted.

Test 5: thinking about where I would like to choose as a landscape

IN FREE FALL: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

As I've been using Google Maps for a lot of this project, and I've been subjected to this top-down aerial view of the Earth. Even in the 3D modelling software I'm using, I've felt like a floating entity looking down over the world. As I was looking for things to research, I came across an article by Hito Steyerl titled "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective", which pertains to the aerial surveillance view.

The article starts off by getting us to picture a person falling infinitely with no ground. Because the person doesn't have context to the ground, it changes their feelings from ones of falling to ones of floating. This person would understandably be confused as they forget which way up and down are, and as they spin out of control the horizon spins along with their perspective. "This disorientation is partly due to the loss of a stable horizon. And with the loss of horizon also comes the departure of a stable paradigm of orientation, which has situated concepts of subject and object, of time and space throughout modernity. In falling, the lines of the horizon shatter, twirl around, and superimpose".

Another way to describe the aerial perspective is to call it "God's; Eye View". I think that this is an apt descriptor, as it conjures the sensation of being an omnipotent entity looking down on its creation. We have gotten used to this God's eye view, with things like drones, sattelites, or Google Earth showing us other perspectives that we have grown accustomed to.

"Our traditional sense of orientation - and, with it, modern concepts of time and space- are based on a stable line: the horizon line. It's stability hinges on the stability of an observer, who is thought to be located on a ground of sorts, a shoreline, a boat - a ground that can be imagined as stable, even if in fact it is not". This idea is echoed in landscape photography theory - where the placement of the horizon is important to what kind of presence you want your image to have. Plus, the image of a stable ground (the Earth) will give context that it is in fact stable. Another quote that I found that is quite relevant to this is: "the horizon is conceived as an abstract flat line upon which the points on any horizontal plane converge". This would mean that the photographical horizon isn't a solid thing that you can photograph, rather it is a line that is determined after the photograph is taken.

The horizon also brings a sense of linear time with it, because the space that is "defined by linear perspective is calculable, navigable, and predictable". People have been using the horizon to navigate the seas, which ghave them a sense of orientation, which paved the way for colonialism and the spread of capitalism, and the "construction of the optical paradigms that came to define modernity, the most important paradigm being that of so-called linear perspective".

The visual paradigm has changed now, as linear perspective is no longer the dominant perspective. The transition had already taken place in the world of painting. Steyerl's piece talks about a painting titled "A Slave Ship", by J.M.W Turner. The subject matter of the work is a moment where "the captain of a slave ship discovered that his insurance only covered slaves lost at sea, and not those dying of ill on board, he ordered all dying and sick slaves to be thrown over board. This painting has no straight discernible horizon, it's twisting and turbulent, taking the stable position of the viewer away. This unsettlement is mirrored in the imagery, of slaves being reduced to shark feed in the water. Seeing the effect colonialism had after it had been guided by linear perspective, I can see why the horizon is cut up and twisted. It shows a darker, more murderous side of what looked like a brighter future, for the victors, anyway. I think that it is interesting that the horizon being crests of waves also does something to heighten the instability of the viewer, as the waves bring the feeling of rising and falling, crashing into the sea surface and pushing. Perhaps trying to replicate the movement of the ocean or water into my work somehow, to see if the instability is heightened.

The article also talks of a second painting by Turner, titled "Rain, Steam, and Speed, The Great Western Railway". In which, the horizon ambiguously blurs into the background. No linear perspective, no vanishing point, and no clear sense of past or future. There is also no assumed position of the observer, nor do they have any stable ground to stand on. These paintings haven't removed the horizon, but makes it very hard to see, making it ambiguous. Unlike landscape photography, where it is pretty easy to tell where it is. I feel that this all creates an effect where I feel as if I'm hovering. Using "A Slave Ship" for example, looking at the undulating, ever-changing ground beneath me and the choppy horizon line make me feel like I'm a ghost, Perhaps the fact that I know that the ground in the painting is water (unstable surface) that makes me feel that way.

Hito also said that 3D cinema and games are big proponents of bringing the aerial view to our acceptance, saying that "the new characteristics of aerial views are fully exploited by staging vertiginous flights into abysses. One could almost say that 3D and the construction of imaginary vertical worlds [] are essential to each other".

Things like Google Maps create a false belief that they are portraying a "stable ground", when in fact all they are doing is showing a representation of one. This viewpoint that GMaps gives us creates a perspective of a spectator safely flying from one destination to the next. "Just as linear perspective established an imaginary stable observer and horizon, so does the perspective from above establish an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground". This is all born from humans figuring out how to detach their gaze. First it was "mobile and mechanised" through photography, but now we've put cameras into space, getting us further in to our quest to becoming omniscient.

I found that read very curious, and it really opened my eyes how quickly I can get used to a perspective that I would never see myself by natural means. Even the photographs from Mars from the Curiosity rover - while astounding and groundbreaking - felt stable and the perspective was low to the ground, just like a human's. I would really enjoy playing around with this instability of the spectator, as I think that the sense of falling will add a lot to the eeriness and confusion of the project. I am also very inspired by J.M.W Turner's paintings that I was introduced to here, and I think that working with the chaotic but natural flow of water and the ocean will give me the instability that I'm looking for. I think that the best way to do this is to mess with the 3D model of the location, to change it from a stable ground to a broken one. I would also like to play around with focus and blur, to see if the ambiguity of the horizon can add to the effect (like in the Great Western Railway painting).

With the first few images in this "shoot", I wanted to see what changing the colour from black to something else would do. I've found that it isn't as effective. I think it's for the same reason why people choose black framing for their photographs, because the black doesn't compliment or clash with any other colours in the image, it makes everything stand out instead. The coloured backgrounds make the contrast range a lot lower which makes the images look a lot muddier, whereas you can clearly see a defined horizon and difference between sky and land. Plus, choosing one specific colour over the others for a specific shot requires a reason that I don't have.

However, these images still show how good the broken up effect looks. I achieved this by making the 3D model that RenderDoc gave me into a solid body (it exports with multiple parts, like a grid), and sculpting it using the cloth physics tool in Blender. I can then drag the model around as if it were a piece of cloth. Of course, the higher the polygon count the more realistic it would be, but since we're using a very simple model there aren't enough triangles to fill in the empty spaces, so it just looks torn up and shattered instead. The above image is also great at producing a feeling of motion, as the land in the image cascades into a centre point. As everything falls away it makes the ground that we are supposedly situated on feel very unstable, as every part of the image looks like it has been impacted in some way and has started to disintegrate, as if humanity is set to crumble away with the infrastructure surrounding them.

There also seems to be a fluidity to these images as well. When I was sculpting the model with the cloth physics, it will pull and push areas until you're left with an undulating plane, and when you shoot images of it it produces the effect that the city scape is in a constant state of motion, like the surface of water. This implied motion also adds to the instability of the viewer, just like in the J.M.W Turner paintings.

As you can see, like I mentioned earlier, the deep black skies separates the foreground with the background much better. Plus, the void skies in these images are quite symbolic to me, as this is how I picture things in my head. If I try to think of an object, it often appears in my head as if it were in a 3D modelling software, centred in my vision, with darkness surrounding it completely. If I want to picture a cube, I only picture the cube, no table for it to stand on, no background to contextualise it, just the cube surrounded by complete blackness. I just found it very amusing that there is that parallel in my work. Admittedly, third year has been a very dark time for me, and I have been having a very difficult time coping day to day. I think that this reflection of what things look like inside of my mind is a subtle way of my subconscious trying to get people to understand me. The unstableness of our everyday surroundings is something I feel every day. I struggle to get outside my room sometimes because my anxiety is so bad and I get this feeling of dread like at any moment the ground could collapse. I also think that this is a representation of how experiences of place can shape how they are perceived. I originally wanted to choose my University town for this shoot but the only 3D data the model had was for the ground, all the buildings were flat so I went with my hometown of Maidstone instead. Mental health is definitely a struggle but for a teenager trying to figure out how they feel in such a turbulent world it can feel so much more confusing and mentally taxing. I have had experiences in this town growing up - I've been hurt, made fun of, broken up with, lost, and outcast, and I've been in mental states I hope I never see again. Now that I've lived away from it for 3 years I can look at it a lot more objectively, and I can definitely say that my experiences there has definitely warped my perception of it. It's also kind of endeared it to me a little. As I went through this 3D model for some renders I caught myself recalling memories of specific areas in the model.

I understand that the audience won't understand my pain through what's in the image. Nothing about Maidstone says "mental anguish" (unless you live there). I think that the fluidity of the horizon and the feeling of falling can allow the audience to step into my mind, to catch a glimpse of what anxiety feels like. To react as if someone you love has just died when someone asks to re-arrange a meeting. To take something small (sometimes completely nothing) like an uncertainty and let it take over your brain with worry and doubt.

I particularly like the above image, as it appears that the road is cascading down off frame in the bottom of the image, appearing like some kind of tarmac waterfall. I also like the cars on the road as well, they add to the overall motion of the image.

Since I looked at Steyerl's God's Eye View, I thought I might as well take some aerial shots. These shots are particularly amusing, as they appear to be dioramas made of paper that is in the early stages of being blown away by a desk fan.

And here I took some far away shots of the model, to show the extent of how much I changed the model. It looks completely unrecognisable here, but you still get the idea of the implied motion. It kind of looks like a flag flapping around in the wind.

I also thought about playing with focus, to maybe add some realism to the images. It also focuses your eyes to certain points and tells you not to worry about others, so I can guide the audience to look at whatever I'd like in the photo. I have found however that the blur can also serve to miniaturise the model. There is no context of scale to size up the 3D model against so the blur can either look like it's really far away, or like we used a macro lens on a tiny 3D model.. The below image is another particularly strong one, this time replicating a different body of water - the ocean. The wave on the left is crashing down onto the ocean surface on the right, and the impact has caused chaos and turbulence in the water. This one implies motion that is quite violent, and so might get my ideas across to the audience a lot better.

Here I tried to try a simpler photo - to see if I could still imply motion through a blur. Spoiler alert, I couldn't.

I also tried other ways of distorting the model, like this way where I extruded one of the surfaces, making the pixels on the bottom edges stretch all the way down. This also serves to make the 3D model look like a toy or a science project diorama rather than a landscape. Also, I don't feel any motion when looking at them. I think that it is the horizontality of the stretched pixels that makes me feel stuck in the mud.

Another way that I distorted this 3D model is the Transform To Sphere method. Before you join the pieces of this model together, it is made up of components (seen in the above image), and you can click Transform to Sphere, which will arrange them in a circle. When you look at the changed model from the side, you can see all the roads and buildings jammed into one another, creating giant amalgam cities that only gestures towards an idea of a place, rather than representing it one to one. This chaos is another good way of representing my mental health, as some things no matter how small can send me into a spiral of confusion and I start to doubt the things I trusted around me.

The above and below images are my favourite from the Transform to Sphere tests, as it looks as if the infrastructure is falling out of the sky, rather than obliterating itself like in the other shoot.

Looking back at my landscape photography notes again, I realised that I opted for the high angle horizon, attempting to capture as much detail as possible. I said that it didn't have anything to do with making the image feel chaotic and claustrophobic, but I think that that was because the subject of the photo wasn't very chaotic or claustrophobic in the first place. The shoot with the cloth physics city changed that around, where the more detail I fitted in, the more shards of matter you could see flying around, and you can see walls, roads, bridges, and trees all at vertical angles and you definitely start to feel that you are unsafe. I feel as if I am being whipped around by the turbulent ocean-like surface of the city, and like I'm about to be crushed by giant angular walls of concrete.

My initial idea for this project was to make people feel uneasy. I wanted to utilise the uncanny valley and try and get people to feel creeped out by it. As this year has drawn on and come to a close my mental health and subconscious has leaked itself onto my work, and it has become less about wanting to produce emotions in people, and more about trying to get people to understand mine. The horrible and exhausting anxiety that plagues me daily is represented by the instability, hostility, and implied velocity of the landscapes, and the hopeless and taxing depression is reflected in the angry, sharp-edged, broken up city that I call home.

POOR IMAGE

Since my work could be put in the "Image Appropriation" category (the photographs I'm using are utilitarian satellite images), I thought it would be a good idea to re-read Hito Steyerl's Poor Image. I have read it before for my previous project WISWILITL, but it didn't really apply. I'm hoping that now both Hito and I are thinking in the same ball park here, I'll read this article once more and take more away from it this time.

One thing mentioned in the article is low resolution, and how everyone is pushing to get as far away from it as possible, trying to get more and more megapixels. My WISWILITL project was all about this, and how I think we should embrace it and appreciate it for the visual interest low resolution can bring. Look at the textures on the sides of the buildings and roads, if they were higher resolution it might have higher detail and it might look more "real", but I prefer the pixelated, fuzzy textures the 3D models have, because there is more visual interest in it. If it replicates real life perfectly, it will only look normal. If it looks different to how it looks in real life, then it looks stylised, and purposeful.

A quote that I think resonates with this project goes as follows: "Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images—their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement". I procured the textures of the 3D model through downloading them from Google Maps, and if we think back to when we read through the Google Maps Terms of Service, it doesn't appear that they particularly like it when people use their images for their own projects. The low resolution of them degrades it in quality which delegitimises it in the eyes of the law.

I don't know if it's because I'm thick or if I'm just not understanding it, but I really think that this article is only concerned with film. Sure there are crossovers with other art forms, but when Steyerl goes into more detail about what she means, she only uses film anecdotes and analogies which makes it difficult to relate it to my practice.

PRESENTATION IDEAS

As presenting this work goes, I want to keep it relatively simple. No 3D printing or projections, just nice, big, glossy prints stuck to a wall. I've decided this for many reasons, first being that I've taken a lot of notes from traditional landscape photography and employed a lot of technique from that school, and I think that will come across a lot better if I present them like a landscape photograph. People need context to better understand things. If they see an image of a city (however distorted it is) in landscape orientation stuck on a wall with other photographs the audience will have the surrounding context to better understand the subject matter of the images. The second reason is because I rarely forget an exhibition I go to, and when I was 15/16 I went to an exhibition in London where they were showing Thomas Ruff's JPEG series. These prints were colossal, they must have been 6ftx10ft easily. The size of these prints did a lot to how they were perceived. The series relies on JPEG compression as its main effect, so when you are up close to these huge prints it is very difficult to tell what they are. That is until you step to the other side of the hall, where all the pixels become smaller to you and you can make out what the image is. I would like my work to have the same effect - where you'd only be able to see a mixture of colours and triangles, but when you start to back away, you can get the picture better. There is something about dynamic interaction with images that draws the audience in, and the eureka moment that I had when I saw Ruff's prints from afar stuck with me for a long time.

Unfortunately, as the project came to an end, my student loan became used less on university projects and more on rent. so I had next to no money to make some prints. I bought three A2 sheets of glossy paper (I think that colours and blacks are much deeper on glossy paper, I think the matte paper reduces contrast a little as it diffuses light over its surface.). which is still a nice size for an image, and printed them using an Epson Stylus Pro 4880. When I went to hang the prints, I got a little creative. Since a lot of the work is about looking at the horizon, I took the images and staggered them so that they flowed into one another. This once again added a fluidity to the images, and helped the audiences eyes drift from one print to the next. I also decided to leave them unmounted, as I like how the borderlessness opens the image up, insinuating that there is more beyond the borders of the page. I feel as if a white border frames it, but stops any inquisitiveness about the image, because the frame makes it look like all you need to be concerned about is what is within it.

I also picked the three strongest images from my shoots to show, because like I said, they each reflect the ideas that I am trying to get across more clearly than the others. In an ideal world I would have chosen a few more than 3 images to truly create an ocean of concrete but money and exhibition space was holding me back. I was exhibiting in a hallway at uni, so I only had enough space to fit the three prints side by side like that.

If I had the opportunity to print more, I think it would be great to see a long line of images staggered so that the horizons flow into each other, taking up an entire gallery hallway or room.

To begin with, I had pretty extravagant ideas for presenting my work, but due to lack of time, little money, and few resources, I had to settle with prints.

My first idea was to present the work on globes. I wanted to take 360 degree screenshots of the landscapes and map the image to a sphere, creating a fish-eye peephole effect.

Flat 360 Degree Images

Videos of Images Mapped to Globes

I was heavily inspired by a symposium I read by Susan Derges, where they talk about some work pertaining to "The Globe View". The globe view is an interesting subject because it deals with alternate perspectives that humans aren't used to seeing. Think about the act of looking up at the stars. The Victorians took that past-time and reversed the flow of vision, turning the star-scape into a spinnable globe. What was meant to be a fun and easy way to look for and find constellations turned out to be a godlike attempt to miniaturise our outward view, to make ourselves seem less small on our pale blue dot in the universe. I drew a helpful diagram below that illustrates what I mean by "reversing the flow of vision", just in case I'm confusing anyone.

I was enthralled with the human exploit to become Gods through achieving perspectives previously thought unattainable, which was already reflected in the work I was producing. I even made some mock-ups to see what it would look like, and I thought that they looked quite good, and achieved what I wanted. A 360 degree image is meant to be viewed mapped on a sphere in the first place, but viewed from the inside, like earth's view of the stars. When we reverse our vision, we have a globe, encompassing our surroundings in an easy to digest, viewable in one eyeshot way.

INSERT GLOBE VIEW TESTS:

- take 360 degree screenshots of cityscape model

- map to globe in adobe dimension

- make gifs of globes spinning.

However, the problem was that it wasn't very practical. I'm sure if I had unlimited time and money that I would be able to get a sphere of some variety, warp an image so that I can cut it out and wrap it neatly around a globe, print it on vinyl, and stick it down, but unfortunately I wasn't able to realise it. I would like to create these globe images in the future though, I enjoyed the fisheye orb effect that it creates, as if I'm looking into a portal to another dimension.

I also thought about projections. I looked at an artist named Tony Oursler, who projects his work onto non-linear surfaces, adding a whole new third dimension to his photographical work. This was another idea that I liked but didn't have the time or resources to realise. The idea was to 3D print sections of the cityscape 3D model that I get from RenderDoc, put them together, and project the textures onto it from above. This would also miniaturise the work, which both makes us feel like we are Gods floating around space and looking down on our subjects, but it also makes something that we humans are used to seeing huge but are seeing it presented small. I definitely wanted a sense of grandiose when I present the work, which I feel is juxtaposed through this method. The other way I thought about projecting is a little like Oursler's 2021 exhibition in Taiwan titled "Black Box", where giant cardboard shapes are cut out, with moving images projected on them.

Tony Oursler's Work Being Shown in The Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts

I could replicate this by recreating a part of my 3D model to human scale in an exhibition space with paper and cardboard, and then project the textures onto it, basically placing you down inside the 3D model. This would take a lot of work, but it would be doable. I'd have to get a section of the 3D model and put it in some kind of origami generator that can take a 3D shape, flatten it, and tell you where and when to fold the creases to create that 3D shape out of paper. I would then need multiple projectors to project all the different faces of the model too. Like I said, I would need a lot of money and a big enough space to pull this off, but I still think that it is still an incredibly effective way of showing this work. What better way to fully immerse someone in the work and letting them walk around in it, fully appreciating the scale without using a VR headset? This idea reminds me of the beginning of Independent Practice, where I was looking at effective immersive ways of presenting work, and I dismissed a walk-in installation work over a VR headset. I did this for multiple reasons, I had already got an idea of what I wanted in my head so put all my efforts into creating that thing, and I wanted it to be easier, less stressful, and to be completed and shown within the confines of my bedroom (because Covid-19 would have made it incredibly difficult to produce a large scale piece that requires human interaction to appreciate).

In the end, as cool and extravagant some of these ideas are, the best course of action ended up being the simplest one. If I could present my work this way again I would have gone with larger prints in order to achieve the Thomas Ruff JPEG effect brought about by the scale of the images but again money held me back and I had to settle for something smaller. Still though, the colours and blacks were as deep as I wanted them to be, the implied motion and instability translates through the printed page, and they come across and can be read and digested as landscape pieces.

EPILOGUE

Man, this unit was hard. The making of the work was the easy part, the hard part was the writing, researching, breakup, misery, panic attacks, and feeling like a failure as an artist. I often feel that if I'm struggling to the point of tears and sheer panic at my art uni work, then I must not be cut out to be an artist. But I don't think that it's true. The making of the art is what makes my heart sing, it's just the academized version of art that I suck at. I can pour my heart and soul into a piece, but if it isn't backed up with academic sources and research then I'll be told that it isn't good enough. I also feel that a lot of work done on my course is geared towards making your practice suitable to make money, but that's not how things should be. Art is not a commodity or a capitalist venture, it is a thing that humans naturally do. Humans have been expressing themselves and creating art for thousands of years, but the criteria of what makes a successful artist has only changed in recent years, from technical ability to the art of storytelling, to likes on Instagram and who has the best camera. I'm sure my classmates that take studio portraits are going to make it further in the photography world than I ever will, but I don't care, because that "world" is full of cutthroat, money-hungry people that have forgotten what art is all about. I know that I am not a failure as an artist because I make art, and it makes me happy. Also, I seem to forget about my past achievements a lot, and focus on things that are happening right now. It's a symptom of anxiety, but I never remember the fact that I have come a long damn way to get where I am right now, I have worked incredibly hard and I have pushed through each mental struggle and picked myself every time I felt like I couldn't go on. It's hard to feel like a failure when you've won the fight.

I know this work isn't as fleshed out as my other pieces and that is a shame considering this is the last uni project I will ever do, but if you could only understand how hard it has been for me to cope, let alone sit down and chip away at university work. I have reached out to my course leaders several times throughout this unit for help, and every time I have been heard, understood, and helped, and I would like to take a moment to thank them, because without their help and advice I don't think I would have finished it at all. I haven't been able to interact with my coursemates at all this year. In my previous two years at university I've really enjoyed being in an artistic ecosphere and being part of that community (even though I spent most days alone in class), but because Covid was a thing this year, we've all been removed from that ecosystem and it's felt a little like I'm the only one on this course anymore. But, even though no one really talked to me I still wish everyone the best success with their work, and I hope you all go further in life than you ever imagined. You are all so talented and I often think back to the hand-ins we'd do where we stuck up work for a unit in G152 and I remember being blown away constantly at the art that my contemporaries were making. It felt like a privilege to be amongst you guys. Good luck!