Digital Uncanny: Texture Maps
Digital Uncanny: Texture Maps is a series of photographic prints made from the texture maps that photogrammetry software generates from natural history specimens. Its starting point is Jorge Luis Borges’s parable of a map drawn to the size of the empire it describes.
In “On Exactitude in Science”, published in 1946, Jorge Luis Borges describes an empire whose cartographers draw a map the size of the empire, coinciding with it point for point. Later generations find the map useless and leave it to the sun and the winters. Tattered ruins of it survive in the western deserts, inhabited by animals and beggars. Borges presents the passage as a fragment of a seventeenth-century travel book by Suárez Miranda, an author he invented.
Jean Baudrillard opens Simulacra and Simulation (1981) with the same fable and turns it around. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. The map comes first, and it is the real whose shreds slowly rot across its extent. What is left is what Baudrillard calls “the desert of the real itself”.
A texture map is a flat image that photogrammetry software assembles from many overlapping photographs of an object. The software unfolds the surface of the object along seams and lays it flat. The image is then wrapped back around a 3D model so that every pixel sits on a point of the object. This is Borges’s map at the scale of a single specimen. Laid out flat it is hard to read. Fragments of surface sit side by side in an order set by the software rather than by the animal.
The specimens come from natural history collections, a system of classification built to make nature knowable. In many cases the collection now holds the only material evidence of what has been lost. Photogrammetry adds a second archive to the first, one that can be turned on a screen without anyone opening a drawer. Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction strips an object of its aura. The digital copy carries that loss and adds another. A model close enough to the real thing to persuade, but not quite close enough, produces the unease that the roboticist Masahiro Mori named the uncanny valley in 1970.
N. Katherine Hayles argued that simulation reminds us our contact with nature was always constructed, passing through the body’s own senses before it reaches thought. As the natural world recedes, more of it is met through a screen. The prints return the texture map to paper and hold it still long enough to be looked at. The more immersive the image becomes, the easier it is to forget it is still a map.