Convergent Residuals

More-or-less completed image that will be presented for third and last crit of the semester (Dec.1)

Untitled Composite

 Main image presented for the second crit. (Oct.27)

 I printed it big enough

taking-down hijinks

Fledgling second Bridgetown image

Here's another image I'm working on that's set in the same "Bridgetown Belt" world as the first image. Still clearly in a rough, early stage. 

Sketchup makes the process interesting, I have the freedom to be slightly more automatic in filling in the blank spaces and experiment more efficiently. Even so it's pretty slow going, there's still a lot of time spent with trying to make things work that I eventually have to give up on. Even so I think it's an interesting new way to work.

I'll hit the next stage in the development of this image when all the blank spaces are fully textured. At that point I can add further textures to enhance detail and ambiance, and work on blending the lighting and colour to make the composite look less like a goblin-spawned Lego heap. 

Thinking about including a foreground element to occupy  about half of the open portion on the right hand side, though I'm not sure just what to use. The POV for this shot in Sketchup is from a point in open space with no large structures around, so I'm thinking about  something light and movable. Maybe something attached to a crane...  

406 Crit #1 image (Bridgetown Belt 1)

First up, here's what I presented for my first crit back at the end of September:

Feedback was generally positive, people seemed most happy with the fact that I chose components that complemented each other well enough colour and lighting-wise to give an adequately seamless impression. I was pleased to hear my professor Linda note that the stairwell leading downward did a particularly good job of opening up the world of the image to the imagination.
The main problem most people had with this image was the part that I'd been struggling to resolve from the beginning, the top-right hand portion showing the structures and land below. The difficulty of finding an adequate image to suit the extreme downward angle combined with impressive height was something I didn't manage to overcome. Instead I copped out and went with some strangely scaled trees and a rooftop of dubious perspective. In the end it just kind of compromises the integrity of the whole rest of the image.

To rectify this, I realized it would be a good idea to model the scene in 3D, which was my original plan anyway. I gave Google Sketchup a try, and after some initial hiccups I was able to get into it and model the space as well as the larger area I have in mind for the setting as a whole.

I quickly took to Sketchup since it would allow me to not have to worry so much about scale and perspective; I could use it to correct what I already had going and also to find perspectives from which to create new images, simply by moving through 3D space. Problem with that was I spent too much time in the program without making progress in Photoshop, which left me at a disadvantageous position leading up to the second crit last week Thursday (October 27). But more on that later. Here's where I'm at with the image at the moment:

More stuff going up shortly.

Megabyte contemplates a Null / Blog Resurrection Attempt #2

Let's see if I can manage to actually post something again. This picture is a start. It'll take several posts to catch up with what I've been up to lately, so bear with me.

a change of perspective

Last week I had a discussion with my instructor Brad about my working process and some general limitations that I felt it would be good to break out from. One of the things that's bugged me about my previous composites, such as the Emplacement/Spectre/Object for example, is that they invariably settle into a "detatched" perspective, with no clear evidence of where the photographer is standing in relation to the whole environment. As a result there is a lack of any foreground/background dynamic, instead there is only background, a more or less flat plane. 

This type of perspective works well for photographers like Edward Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky, who use grand-scale perspectives without a "grounding" foreground to render real-world places appear alien and leveled out to such a degree that abstract forms and patterns become an immediate visual highlight. 

Andreas Gursky, Pyongyang V, 2007.

But when it comes to what I'm doing by creating an image of a place that doesn't exist, I think it's important to establish a clear sense of scale in order for the viewer to get a better idea of how big things are in relation to human size. I've included human figures in my composites before in hopes of accomplishing this feat, but I've found that because they are always so totally dwarfed by their surroundings, people viewing my images have often completely overlooked the fact that there are figures in them at all.

Because my end goal in making these composites is to create depictions of non-existent environments that people hopefully find interesting enough to reflect upon, I'm always striving to direct the focus towards making my images more immersive and less akin to merely an elaborate display of my Photoshop collage technique. Hopefully by widening the depth of field and including a definite foreground with my latest composite, I'll be moving closer towards that goal.  

new composite

This is what I have so far for my newest composite, which should be completed for the crit next week Thursday (Sep. 29).

I've chosen the angle specifically so that more than half of the image is at immediate scale, the original dimensions preserved from my initial photograph. Beyond that is an adjacent building separated by a gap I'll try to bridge with flagging and/or wires. The top right portion will be open, showing the distant ground below. Hopefully I can complete at least one more composite for the crit.
Textual accompaniment will likely be significantly trimmed down by comparison to my last work. During my meeting with my instructor Brad last week, he made the point that it's important not to let the text end up doing more conceptual heavy-lifting than the actual images, lest the composites become sidelined and the text a kind of crutch to express my ideas. I think he makes a good point, and I agree that it's best if I try to communicate my ideas through the images primarily.

Re-Design!

I'd been meaning to make a few changes to the look of this blog for a while to help breathe some new life into it. I realized, finally, that the whole pale-green-text-on-black was a pain on the eyes. Hopefully now anyone who actually reads this will find it easier to do so.

Watched The Tree of Life last night at UVic's Cinecenta theatre. The film itself was absolutely beautiful, unfortunately the thing that stands out most in my memory of the experience is the bloated gray haired man who was sitting behind me to my right, who constantly grunted, coughed, scratched himself, yawned loudly, and when his discomfort seemed not to be apparent enough to everyone else, hissed "fuuuuck" under his breath. Debating whether or not I should go back and see it again tonight, in hopes of expunging his presence in my mind whenever I think of the movie...

the bridge town belt

From The National Library of Scotland

One of my most memorable Scotland experiences was seeing the Forth Bridge for the first time. For some reason or other I had never seen pictures of it or even heard of it until the moment when my Edinburgh bus drove onto the Forth Road Bridge and I saw it across the water parallel to me. I was fairly awestruck first because of just how big it is, making any bridge I'd seen prior look like a glorified log-over-the-creek by comparison.

by itmpa

Then I noticed that a number of small temporary shelters had been erected around its supporting piers above the water, which I've now learned were there because of the ongoing re-painting project on the bridge. Seeing the shelters strangely clustered about between the water below and the rail line above put an idea in my head: What if such shelters weren't temporary?

by itmpa

Could some form of habitation or development build up over time around massive bridge supports? Imagine a succession of trading communities, each clustered around a pier section of the bridge, perfectly situated to facilitate boat travel between the bridge towns and other  ports. The bridge could serve double modes of transport: it's original purpose as a linear carriageway above and as a more ad-hoc, accretionary artery below.

Perhaps the original purpose of the bridge's design would become obsolete as, say, the body of water it bridged flowed out or dried up (as was likely the case with the Mediterranean Sea in the geologic past) but the occupation of it's piers remained. Over time as the water level drops the inhabitants of the bridge might begin moving lower and lower down the supports, along the way harvesting the materials of the bridge's defunct superstructure to use in building around the bridge's substructure. Eventually only its inhabited supports might remain, looking like a strange procession of apartment blocks (or vertical communities, to use more open terminology) along a dry basin.

by itmpa

From The National Library of Scotland

The above image is from the National Library of Scotland's Flickr page, and the stages of the bridge's construction showing its supports going up pretty well match my picture of what a bridge like that might eventually look like.This "bridge town belt" concept is what I'll be running with for my next composite. I'd like to make a profile of these former bridge piers, now existing as a series of vertical communities, independent yet linked in succession from their original purpose of supporting a causeway now long gone.

This blog is being exhumed and re-animated...

Though to be honest it was rather corpselike even in its days of life. I intend to rectify that and hopefully get this thing into a regular posting schedule that doesn't resemble a decrepit zombie shamble. I think this blog will be just as useful in keeping track of my progress and ideas for my last year here at UVic as it was when I was at Gray's, so hopefully I'll be able to keep it going.

Getting that out of the way, I have an idea that will hopefully improve my creative process. I was thinking as I was walking home today that I often struggle with the stage in my work that involves taking an imagined space in my head and first sketching it out on paper, before I start doing anything in Photoshop. When it comes to sketching, I'm good at meticulous detail but I often struggle with perspective and scale, and drawing out an environment by hand is something that just doesn't come natural to me.

Instead of sketching, I realized that an easier way of getting the right perspective for a space would be to map it out in three dimensions on the computer using a map editing program. There's a map editor my friend showed me a few years ago that we've been using off and on since: Cube 2 - Sauerbraten. On the surface it looks like a generic freeware first-person shooter, but the game also offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use editing mode. In the editing mode you can build almost anything, large or small, from the size of a massive skyscraper down to a barstool for example. In addition, it can render accurate shadows from anything you create relative to multiple light sources of any chosen positioning. On top of that, it's only slightly more complicated than Lego.

My plan is to build a rough layout of the major elements of my imagined scene in Sauerbraten, and using that choose a specific point of view that encompasses what I want out of the scene. From this vantage I will take a screenshot, making a bitmap image which I can then bring into photoshop and overlay with my image fragments to eventually create the photo-realistic scene.

After having the idea, I arrived home to discover that someone else has already begun making work using nearly the exact same process. Belgian architectural photographer Filip Dujardin, evidently having gotten tired of photographing other people's architectural designs, decided to construct his own on the computer. He models a design using Google's 3D modeling tool, SketchUp, and chooses a perspective and converts it into a 2D line drawing. Importing the drawing into Photoshop, he then gives his model texture based on source images he has taken of a specific building. Here's what some of his stuff looks like:

Cool stuff, a bit sterile for my taste but good nonetheless. I've downloaded SketchUp and I'll try it out, though I think Cube 2 will be my best bet. I'll put together a map and have some first images to show pretty soon.

brazen code

Images I shot yesterday. Normally after shooting I'd just have a look at them and let them sit for a long while; I have a massive backlog of images to edit through, convert to jpeg and upload to flickr. These pictures felt special, however. Shot on my camera's highest ISO setting. Embrace the grain.

Emplacement/Spectre/Object

Decrypted Correspondence Fragment - Boreal-Liminar Array

Reconnaissance has gathered these articles documenting Indigenous activity at Emplacement 4 (Coastal):

A.     Excerpt from archaic expedition journal, recovered from ruin across from Emplacement site:

The Object is not far ahead now, so says our guide as best we can tell. He still hasn't stopped giving us that look, which in his position is understandable I suppose. If two women and a man arrived in my village from a land I'd only seen written of in carved stone, asking after the strange looming thing of the coast, I'd certainly find it difficult to adjust to the fact that I'd been entrusted to guide them. We've come a very long way.

Not looking forward to siphoning from the Object. If the Institute is correct (and they certainly should be, funding an expedition at a time like this), then the Object should be casting flares and wilting the local greenery right now. Nela and Dan both have extraction experience as much as me, but that doesn't change the fact that no one before us has come so far to harvest from an Object this potent.

Yesterday Dan went on about it being “strange to harvest resources from something built for some other purpose by people long before us.”  I can’t say his reservations were welcomed by Nela and me. "Research Expedition" sounds nice, but it's no secret that the only priority we have that matters is to bring back something to make the situation better back home. Just hope Nela's doing alright, she's strong but I can tell that what happened in her district before we left must still be wearing on her.

B.     Approximate transcription of carved text in stone along a path in view of Emplacement site:

This silent Spectre, long ago, began belching flame, and causing all growing things to wither. The people of the land nearby feared famine. The emanations of decay continued to spread from the ill place, regardless of the people’s protestations. This dread condition continued until the arrival of the Three Envoys. Recognising the Spectre as a threat to the stability of the earth and its people, the Three had set out from their distant dwellings, seeking to remedy the Blight. Having sacrificed much in crossing the vast earth, the Three confronted the Spectre and learned what would be further required from them to fulfill their task. Performing elaborate rituals, the Three sacrificed their own lives in a brilliant flash. Afterward the Spectre's miasmal exhalations abruptly ended. Thus this land is an Emblem of Sacrifice. The People now give up much to travel here as the Three Envoys did, in order to recognise the virtues of Sacrifice.

These articles indicate that Indigenous interference with Emplacements has been consistent, including a sustained period of resource harvesting from multiple sites. Emplacement 4 has been used as a destination of Pilgrimage by the Indigenous since the last active cycle was disrupted. Further assessment contingent upon proceeding(…)

[Decrypt End]

"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears..."

Images I showed for the Canadian Exhibition with Sam. Title quote by Calvino. Sam's Flickr has photos of the event, here. I'll upload a section of my video component once I figure out how.

Exhibition Imminent

Regulars at Gray's will have already seen this plastered all over the building ad nauseum, but here it is to lend official-ness to this post. 

This week had been all about the lead-up to the showing. Monday I scouted out the area that my series is based at and shot preliminary images. Later I ate a mountain of haggis on a plate, and was coerced by my Indian flatmate and the people in my flat to eat more, a chapati with delicious home-cooked curry.  Thoroughly stuffed and nearly immobile, I converted the excessive food-energy into creative power for putting together the above poster. 

Yesterday after throwing the posters up around Gray's with Sam, I shot the images that I'll use for the exhibition. I'm pretty proud with the way they turned out. Printing them for tomorrow is now under way. Tonight I'm going to try shooting some video for the exhibition, so I may have a screen running depending on whether the quality turns out to be satisfactory.

Accompanying the images I'll have an elegant little quote from Calvino's Invisible Cities, a book seemingly designed to deliver eminently quotable profundities at least six times per page. Also I thought I'd put up here the following select quotes; I think they deal with what's going on in my exhibition work much more deftly than all that nebulous rubbish I spouted in the last post. I don't think I'll put these up for the exhibition as it would just make it seem bloated and didactic, but they give good background context in a blog setting:

"Besides the notion of the everyday, the term 'generic' has cropped up in various discussions of contemporary urban space. Thus, instead of zooming in on unique elements, such as historical monuments or geographical peculiarities that establish the identity of places, architects and urban planners have come to devote considerable attention to generic elements. Although these elements are essentially exchangeable and can be located anywhere, they determine the outlook and the functioning of a city to a large extent. (...) 

This interest in exchangeable components of present-day cityscapes stands in diametrical opposition the strong emphasis that was still put on the significance of "place" in architectural theories of the 1970s. In both Kevin Lynch's empirically oriented research and Christian Norberg-Schulz's ideas influenced by Heideggerian phenomenology, it is above all the importance of the genius loci that was stressed. Marking a place as unique was even considered to be the archetypical architectural act and the true raison d'être of architecture."

- Steven Jacobs,  Post-Ex-Sub-Dis (Introduction)

"The new suburbs are no longer just soulless places – anonymous, standardized and uniform – they have in fact developed their own identities. But these identities are fashioned from whole cloth, like movie sets(...) Developments usually have no connection to the original context of the sites where they are built, they are amalgams of cultural, imaginary and borrowed identities. The housing in these places suffers the same fate and is full of grafted-on symbols and references to histories that have nothing to do with our own. We are witness to the appearance of simulated villages, a style that could be called fake-authentic, a pastiche of vanished ways of life. Picturesque features are fabricated, pseudo-heritage values are invented and the target is clients who like to think they are buying something special with a local flavour. Some people even think that these artificial landscapes are real, leading to confusion between what is really part of our cultural heritage and what is only the market value of substitution. This generates false perceptions of who we are."

- Isabelle Hayeur,  Model Homes artist statement

"While authors such as Lynch and Norberg-Schulz considered the identity of a place to be vital to the quality of the city, (architect and writer Rem Koolhaas) sees identity as paralysing: 'The stronger identity, the more it imprisons, the more it resists expansion, interpretation, renewal, contradiction. Identity becomes like a lighthouse- fixed, overdetermined; it can change its position or the pattern it omits only at the cost of destabilising navigation. (Paris can only become more Parisian - it is already on its way to becoming hyper-Paris, a polished caricature)' "

- Steven Jacobs (quoting Rem Koolhaas' S,M,L,XL p.1248),  Post-Ex-Sub-Dis (Introduction)

This historical identity/generic space debate I find quite fascinating, and I'll put together a more in-depth take on the subject in a later post. For now though, go see our exhibition! 

For folks reading this from back across the pond or anyone else who can't make it, pictures/documentation will go up afterward.

Idea

I've been wanting to try something different from solely working on my composites for the past while. I'm certainly not giving up on them, but I've just been starting to feel as though they've been my straightjacket preventing me from trying out new things.

About a week ago I wasn't entirely sure what sort of different things I'd do for the exhibition coming up, besides the fact that they would be less labour-intensive than the landscapes.
Yesterday morning however, as I was walking to school I came upon an idea which I think is pretty quality. I don't want to get too much into specifics yet since I don't have anything concrete that I've done on it so far and things may change. But I will say this:

The images will again blend my own photography with photoshop manipulations. They will be shot in urban environments of the interchangeable type, "non-places" (a type of setting that I've been reading about in my CCS research). They will use the amplified abstraction inherent to such places as a starting point to contort reality as depicted in the photographic image. I'm feeling excited to get my CCS finally out of the way so I can get to work on this new idea. Should I manage to pull it off as I imagine it, it should be of some quality.

Xian Ren Qiao - The Colossal Arch

Photos by Gunter Welz and Ray Millar, from NABS

布柳河仙人橋 - Xian Ren Qiao - Fairy Bridge. Despite it's impressively unimpressive English name, it is the world's largest natural arch, spanning somewhere around 400 feet. It towers over the Buliu River in a remote part of southwestern China's Guangxi province. Fairy Bridge is amazing, not only in the unbelievability of its geological presence, but for the circumstances surrounding its discovery by those outside of China.

The National Arch and Bridge Society (NABS) takes the credit for revealing the existence of the Fairy Bridge to the West in an official manner. It did not do this in the nineteenth century. Neither was the arch recognized in the twentieth. How was this titan arch first detected by a westerner? Using Google Earth. 

One day in 2009, a dude from NABS named Jay Wilbur was poring over the contours of the digital globe and saw something that looked like a proper massive arch:

This led him to Panoramio here, where a Chinese photographer had uploaded his picture of the arch, confirming Wilbur's suspicion. Promptly, NABS organized an expedition to measure the thing. Their first attempt in 2009 failed (not sure why, but indicative of the difficulty of travelling in the region), but they were back out in a 7 person team just last October, with success this time. You can read the illustrated diary of their expedition here, if you want.

So far, NABS's efforts haven't seemed to have bolstered the reputation of Fairy Bridge outside  of China much. Wikipedia's entry for the arch is humorously pitiful: described as the "world's largest natural ark", with zero images and only one link. For more fun, try this: type in "Fairy Bridge arch China" into Google Image Search. Then try "布柳河仙人橋" in the same field. The English name yields a grand total of 2 non-duplicate images of the actual place, while the Chinese name offers up pages of images.  

I just can't get over the strange fact that this thing was first revealed to the wider world not by some kind of Fridtjof Nansen or Aurel Stein exploring on foot in the early twentieth century, but by a guy in a volunteer organization exploring through a computer in the early twenty-first. I like to think it's an effective rebuttal against all those who jadedly bemoan the fact that everything in the world has been already discovered, named, and de-mystified. In my opinion, there still is -and will always be- secrets of the landscape, cityscape, any-scape. Even when (or if) the natural world has been completely mapped, when the last inch of the remotest oceanic trench has been plotted, photographed, and tourist-ed, there will still be unknown aspects of places with which we are familiar and those we are not. Spaces will always hold their secrets, lurking beyond the boundaries of their existing descriptions in in word and image.

2011-03-30 Update (belatedly upped 04-01)

Here's the latest stage of the image I've been working on this week. Posting this a few days late but figured it's a fairly important step and should still go up.

Changed the sky again, I'm pretty sure this one is going to stay. I've also been working on making the top structures look like they're being subsumed back into the landscape, but it's fairly tricky business. I don't like the way the earth on top of the right of the structures looks, the parts where the earth meets the objects will probably take a lot more work before it looks decently convincing. I'm thinking I might want to try and look up images showing natural accumulation on and around existing ruins for reference.

I've also made the scale of the middle buildings considerably smaller. I took another look at the image I started this composition from and realized that the buildings I'd put there were too large for that perspective. Building the middle portion into a town is also proving to be difficult, as I don't have a lot of images to work from that fit that description. I'm hoping for another sunny day to come along so I can go around and shoot some more images that I can use to shape together a bustling little village.

Another part I've neglected thus far is the pit itself. I still need some kind of border to make the pit edge a better join. Below, I'll build something occupying the shadowed pit wall, the curious gazes of the figures on the edge seem to beckon some sort of intrigue.

2011-03-28 Update

Back in the lab again after a week of shooting, a bit of research, and other random stuff. Here's my latest refinement on the first image I worked on. Be aware that the image is at an awkward stage right now where it looks pretty great at thumbnail-size but when you view it full, it's painfully obvious that it's still a WIP.

Jim helpfully mentioned during the crit that the sky at the top of the image was strange looking for that elevation, so I've replaced it with what I think is a more convincing texture.
I've also added a human presence to the image, and eventually the buildings in the middle third of the image will start to look like an inhabited village.
I scrapped the bright hull-thing that was eating up space above, as it's dimensions were awkwardly manipulated and didn't fit with the new direction for the area that I have in mind. I'm going to make the top structures have a few more components, but also be more decayed-looking.

I have some interesting ideas that I'm tossing around for the companion texts of the image. I'm finding that it's enjoyable for me to mull over thematic ideas and possible characters while I work on the visual details of the image. It alleviates some of the boredom of attending to the nitpicking details and provides a good, concrete starting point for me to think thematically. I've never considered myself all that much of a storyteller, but I'm finding it's considerably easier to think about such things when I'm working on something visual. My mind has something solid to spin off from, otherwise I just can't see what the thematic possibilities are.
When I sleep, I have the dullest, most unmemorable and unimaginative dreams.