After the Object
After the Object follows a group of objects through photogrammetry, as a photograph is taken apart into data and reassembled as a digital object. Each work holds one stage of that process.
Photogrammetry takes measurements from overlapping photographs. It was first used to make maps, reading depth from stereoscopic pairs. Digital cameras and cheap computing now allow hundreds of images to be combined, and the software builds a three-dimensional model from them. Archaeologists and museums use it because it records an artefact without touching it. What comes out is no longer a photograph in any sense a viewer would recognise. It is photographic data.
It helps to keep the photographic image and photographic data apart. Writing about the photograph tends to drift towards memory and time, towards what stood in front of the lens at a given moment. Data has no moment. The software reads each photograph for position and colour, then splits what it finds in two. One part is geometry, a mesh of points that describes the shape of the object. The other is surface, the texture map that will be wrapped around that shape. Neither looks like the object on its own.
After the Object follows a group of objects through that split. Some are printed as clear 3D prints, printed on a MultiJet printer from the mesh alone. Colour and texture are gone. What remains is geometry, a form that light passes straight through. A photograph of one of these prints is a photograph of an object made from photographs, and almost nothing photographic survives in it.
The texture maps hold the other half. The surface of the object is cut into pieces and laid flat in an order that suits the machine rather than the eye. A texture map holds everything the clear print lacks, the information needed to make the object look real, and it looks nothing like the object. Hung beside a clear print of the same object, it shows how far apart the two halves of a photograph drift once the software has read it.
The installations bring the two halves back together. In one, two prints hang on the wall with a QR code between them. Scanned with a phone, the code places a starfish in the room with form and surface joined again. You can walk around it and look at it from below. It exists nowhere except on the screen. The objects themselves appear in none of the works. Each work is made after its object, from what the camera took away.