The beginning of my digital programme (Blender) journey. During lockdown, the lack of space lead me to want to explore digital world building.(reminiscent of children's play and world building) I feel interested in the using technology in ways that it was not necessarily made to function as or what they've been created for- it was really exciting inserting these flat plane images or videos interacting with the 3D objects I had made. The static objects being the 3D ones and the flat plane video bringing the static 3D objects life and movement.
Adding light and texture to these little worlds. I like crudely boxing together shapes to create animals from memory. Flat image plane of big croc! added into the sculpted pond.
4th year work
Below croc pond video, travelling through the 2d plane, diving into the pond
Learning to texture paint the 3D objects I'm making. You have to separately save the 2D image that wraps around- I love the ghostly image left from the 3D
I was thinking about what I was finding exciting with making work last year and putting work into public spaces before covid, and that was this sense of exploration, that misunderstandings bring around new thought processes. I was really excited about tactile technology but now we are in a time where touch is not allowed I am trying to figure out how to translate the direction I was going in into different online platforms. Covid has forced people to speak around the issue of accessibility in art spaces, physically for people not able bodied to access buildings and socially etc. Digital spaces have created ways for people to put work out with showing work within institutions/ white cube galleries (of course post covid this conversation needs to carry on and also online doesn't mean accessible to everyone)
I started to create this digital rendering of my tenement street and wanted to create the walk to pollock park that people could experience if they were out of Glasgow or in Glasgow and could go on the walk physically also. I thought about the potential of putting things physically in pollock park too, that the digital rendering pointed towards
Inspo pics for making the monotonous flat blocks, with the potential of putting video works etc. in these spaces that people could explore through
Scraping out the inside of the cube shape the tenement started out as.
The negative space that was used to cut out all the windows and doors floating in the distance
Skeleton of the building and furniture
The foundation of the block of buildings forming. I wanted people to be able to walk through in first person game view
Collecting stock images from Google!
Putting them into Blender and extruding them to create 3D internet objects
Love the stock images of people- they have a stillness, yet such performance and movement! :O
You can't see all the inner workings of how the blender brain is working, so it's a new way of working to get used to, it's not like problem solving with physical objects in front of you, there's lots of programme and coding going on behind every click
I now have access to a 3D printer, I printed out the toilet from the tenement block. Then I started to make things from memory like the shape of a horse, I made some baked beans on toast to see how the printer worked. Something strange about touching a digital creation
I feel excited about using technology for maybe not what it's intended for, or to use it in quite a childlike way, not world building for the purpose of simulation.
Doing lots of digital work I wanted to touch things and draw, some of the little daily doodles. I then wanted to find a way I could put them into a format that enabled them to be 3D printed
Rat and frog below's shadows of 3D printed drawing travelling through the room
Blender file to the left of baked beans
3D wood walk scans, the 2D/3D. A paper like feel, seeing the inside of things. On my walks to Pollock Park I started using this app on my phone that did photgrammatery. I wanted to start using Meshroom programme on my laptop to be able to do more complex photogrammatery spaces. I wanted to try and do photogrammatery of the 3D printed objects I made to re put into the 3D digital spaces in places I could imagine placing physical objects people interact with in Pollock Park.
First photgrammatery spaces, this was a collation of photos I had taken in my tenement flat garden. I love the mistakes that happened as these 2D photos are created into a 3D space. I collaged these together on blender as OBJ files and arranged it into the shape of my garden, with me glitched in the middle looking like I'm contemplating putting the bins out
I was playing on blender with making human like figures and put them into a space interrupting it. I love seeing in real life light interact with these digital objects
Photogrammatery of the 3D printed object to the left, it's interesting to see the glitches that happen from the digital world and the physical
Here is the figures in room, broken up, looking like an ancient dilapidated sculpture
I wasnt sure how the park photogrammtery would turn out because you're meant to do it in clouded even light and I went and did it in evening sun with shadows being cast which Meshroom does not like processing
When doing the cross school crit, people felt like th object was an indication of it being in the physical space. Someone said it felt like forcing the very rigid programme to work in natural ways, forcing the programme to let mistakes happen.
In the crit I was speaking about wanting to create a non linear digital space that enabled exploration, away from classic video game ideas of progression, people from the crit fedback that the photogrammatery spaces felt much more liminal than the tenement street, which was a great external eye, and made me want to think carefully about what made a space feel freely explorative.
Trees turned into crinkled paper
3D print of a person in a room with a cat on their lap, I placed it infront of a youtube video of blue skies.
it took a lot of trial and error as all the lines had to be connected up to keep the integrity of the print
My dissertation has been heavily informing my studio work. Ideas of play, and how we play- this new digital blur we live within where we exist in the framings of the digital world and physical. That these digital spaces can make you play with self representation, you can become something unreal, or be somewhere unreal, not something we are able to do in our physical reality.
There are so many accessible technologies out there on social media apps leading to people playing, this greenscreen for example. I wanted to see how this filter would work with the photogrammetary spaces I have been making, and I couldn't believe how it interacted with the physical world I was in, that I could actually walk up the digital step in reality and digitally. I started to get excited about the potential physical pieces I could make that people would interact with in person, like projecting this green screen image of you in the space, while the viewer could clamber and interact with the building block objects I had made and put into the space that did not look like the digital world projected, but even so the relationship could carry on. The more i became excited about this idea, the more I realised it was not possible because of covid, so I was back to trying to figure out how I could put viewer interaction and interruption of space into a digital form. Maybe I could make some sort of filter people can see themselves through on their phone?
A moving collage, a collaging of body in a mass of other collaged photos creating the 3D photogrammtery.
I would love to see these spaces projected large scale
I am now on Skye in my parents home, having to stay here due to lockdown rules. I have been taking photogrammatery of small things like rocks, twigs, bits of peat and sizing them up, there feels like a sort of child like play to this, being able to world build and make these tiny objects huge! I've been placing it alongside the 3D photogrammetary model of a 3000 year old Broch I visited, at the edge of this cliff. The edge of digital.
Because of the change of plans I can't carry on with the idea of putting things into pollock park alongside a digital rendering of this walk due to not being in Glasgow.
Photogrammatery of the Broch and surrounding area with the help of my dad and his drone! I put it into Verge software so you could walk through it in first person game view, I had it as a collision material so your view was impacted by the lumps and bumps
To the left is the 300 year old Broch, right at the edge of a cliff. These iron age buildings, no one can 100 percent say what they were used for, could have been a defense building, or dwellings people lived in. There's a strange sense of time when inhabiting the same space, it's almost incomprehensible
The strange immortalisation of this object through the new time-space of our consciousness, the digital
I love the date cloud and points that were apparent in the UV unwrapping, the image to the right. The strange unrecognisable unwrapped 3D form.
I wanted to wrap the Broch and surrounding area in it's 2D form- video above of the animation I made of a huge bit of landscape being blanketed. I almost felt like a giant cloaking a world
Below is a line drawing of the broch being used to cloak the 3D rendering of it. I'm not sure what I was doing, maybe it was a way to understand the ancient landscape I'm now situated in. A sort of mapping, understandings cloaking but not quite.
Above are drawings of the smaller rocks then wrapped in the drawings. These smaller parts that make up the landscape all have the possibility of looking huge, I remember as a child being able to see things as huge as I played with my toys, or even myself in spaces
I am now on Skye in my parents home, having to stay here due to lockdown rules. I have been taking photogrammatery of small things like rocks, twigs, bits of peat and sizing them up, there feels like a sort of child like play to this, being able to world build and make these tiny objects huge! I've been placing it alongside the 3D photogrammetary model of a 3000 year old Broch I visited, at the edge of this cliff. The edge of digital.
Because of the change of plans I can't carry on with the idea of putting things into pollock park alongside a digital rendering of this walk due to not being in Glasgow.
Below are small things like stones, twigs, bits of pete and small sand banks all scaled up huge.
The stillness of being here on Skye has made me inhabit the landscape in new ways, when I first got here I was walking all of the time as I thought I was going back to Glasgow after Christmas- but because I have been here for a while I am able to be still, to watch and be silent in the landscape. This has made me notice the subtle intricacies of the other inhabitants of the island. One morning the roe deer were there outside the house, and ate the grass for about 40 minutes. It's so rare to have such a long sighting of the deer, especially roe deer because any noise they hear they jump away! It felt like seeing other worldly beings, creatures away from the human existence we have.
I have been trying to capture them on film by going out walking and finding their paths and hanging out points, but alas, I have never captured them, they are elusive enigma's of the ancient landscape.
This is them on the day they stayed for 40 minutes. Sometimes it felt like they were looking straight at me. It's like an accidental renaissance painting. It's a mother and her babies
Monoprints and tinfoil etchings I did after the roe deer encounter
Writing I did after seeing the roe deer, 'earb' is the Gaelic term for Roe Deer
Below is a speech to text app with the writing I did copied in. I like the unnatural yet digital natural inflections in the voice and the unpredictability of the reading
I hadn't seen the deer since the day they had grazed, but then it snowed. They had been all around the house again, walking up the track- I started to think could it be possible to put these tracks into a music software to create sounds from their foot steps
Below is me beginning to try and input the footprints into FL studios as my free ableton live trial was up. For some reason I cannot get this pattern to play! I have been trying and trying
Below is me overlaying the image of the footsteps into a piano roll.
I want to start inputting the videos I have taken into a digital game format either through verge or unity, ideally unity because that has more scope. I want to have the earb writing as you enter the space playing once, and then collated with sound I have taken throughout my stay on Skye. I've enjoyed looking at the still renaissance like image of the deer listen to the poem like writing through the digital voice.
All the work using blender etc. has very much felt like research, it doesn't feel like resolved work
Stop motion animation from drone footage below
Nature cam footage to the left,, never catching footage of the elusive deer. Even though these are in prime spots where deer have created paths.
I put the footage into video editing software to create a stop motion animation
Not exactly sure how this will take shape in a 3D digital space, but I want to figure out a way people could take a picture of themself or anything around them and that becomes the 2D character that moves through the space. Now that my dissertation is handed in I can focus on how to take it forward.
The text to speech poem reading layered over footage I took of the deer below (sound in the video)
To the right are the videos above being put into blender, to see the potential ways I could make this a 3D environment