"The 3D laser scanner sends invisible beams into the environment, millions of times per second. The laser head shoots at you and me, at a city’s architectures, or a forest’s landscape. Once the beams hit a surface, light is reflected back to the sensor. An informational dot is created. A point with XYZ information, a distinct position in the world. Millions of those points with differences in laser return times and wavelengths then create three-dimensional visual representations, socalled point clouds. This is how LIDAR (“Light Detection and Ranging”) works. Google Street View and Google Earth draw on it to create 3D building models; geospatial sciences use it to map topological properties; self-driving cars depend on it to sense surrounding geographical environments. 1 Ultimately, knowledge-based smart cities may thrive with it."
- "Mobile LIDAR Mediality as Artistic Anti-Environment" by Julia M. Hildebrand and Mimi Sheller
LiDAR is an acronym that stands for "light detection and ranging" or "laser imaging, detection, and ranging". It is not new technology, having been around since the early 1960s, but only recently has it made its way into the hands of consumers on a mass scale. With the invention of the iPhone 12 and other LiDAR capable products, consumers now have the ability to access and utilise this technology through smartphones, tablets and other more "everyday" pieces of digital tech (I say "every day" in quotation marks because the products still cost upwards of $1000 and well... ouch). The spatial mapping properties of LiDAR are interesting to me - I encountered it last year while exploring an interest in data transference, language and the idea of transformation or things being lost in translation across different formats; it is curious to me how accurate yet distorted the scans made through it are, recognisable but never quite right. There is always some sort of glitch that occurs, but whether this alters the experience of the scanned object/place/thing or not I'm not sure (depends on the context and intent perhaps). I think it's sometimes wise to walk into encounters with mediated things with the overt knowledge that you are not encountering the thing itself (Emily Simek discusses this for example when describing the difference between a screenshot of a 3D sculpted object and the digital sculpture itself). Then there's the other issue though of finding the line between a "bad digital copy" and something with meaning...
This week I was able to do some small trials thanks to Elvis and his phone's LiDAR apps. Below are a few examples of the flat .jpeg images that came out of it (these are used for UV mapping the 3D objects; click to expand), as well as a composite image taken from a combined scene in Blender. Objects include an interesting tree, a small plant growing from a rubbish bin, a tiled garden bench, a tiny plant at the base of a tree, and an accidental capture of a puddle):
The mesh used to create the animation to the right is able to be shaded, warped and manipulated in Blender - this offers the possibility of creating abstract/ed environments made up of numerous different sources of visual information and allows for the possibility of exploring them as three-dimensional digital worlds if then set up for VR. My hope for this idea is to continue playing with creating assemblages of film footage, photography, drawings and/or digital sculptures, etc. that form a subjective
environment - perhaps reflective of the different nonhuman viewpoints within them (i.e. the fragments in the water at Orakei, a physical view of the world from outside human height/perception, etc.), a psychological state of the camera holder, a site-specific/personal/or conceptual narrative, an exploration of hyperreality or digital mediation, or another adjacent possibility...
I was also surprised at the difference between photo scanning and video scanning - I only made one photo-based scan, but the amount of detail it picked up was a lot greater than the video. It also resulted in some pretty interesting patterns (I'm not sure what these image files are for when it comes to assembling the scan but they're curious). Once again too abstract to be able to tell what they are or where they came from (something I'm keeping in mind).
LiDAR's application in contemporary art is still a relatively new development, but not nonexistent. The tech has been used in the videogame and animation industry for some time now and is a very easy way to capture the physicality of spaces, textures and details that can then be used in those applications.
(Immediate left: kodkod.io's Presence.Virtue.(Grace), 2021 - combines LiDAR scans, audio from 2001: A Space Odyssey)
(Lower left: Nadia Bey's mixed reality work, DATA DEATH // DEATH OF DATA, 2021)
One example of its use in contemporary art, albeit in a much different aesthetic way than these experiments, is the fictional short film Where the City Can't See by Liam Young (example footage below).
Directed by speculative architect and "make aware artist" Liam Young, and written by author Tim Maughan, "the film is set in the Chinese owned and controlled Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ). In a not-too-distant future, Google maps, urban management systems and CCTV surveillance are not only mapping our cities, but ruling them. The film follows a collection of young factory workers across a single
night, as they drift through the smart city in a driverless taxi, searching for a place they know exists, but that the map doesn’t show. They are part of an underground community that work on the production lines by day, by night adorn themselves in machine vision camouflage and the tribal masks of anti-facial recognition, enacting their escapist fantasies in the hidden spaces of the city. They hack the city and journey through a network of stealth buildings, ruinous landscapes, ghost architectures, anomalies, glitches and sprites, searching for the wilds beyond the machines."
As Young states, "what we're ultimately trying to do is capture the zeitgeist somehow, identify the anxieties and hopes of the present moment and respond to them... [the] film projects are really about examining the cultural implications of these new technologies and exploring the new subcultures that might emerge, the new forms of agency, and the new types of resistance that might emerge in this context".
As writers Julia M. Hildebrand and Mimi Sheller describe in their work "Mobile LIDAR Mediality as Artistic Anti-Environment", LiDAR offers a bridge between physical and digital spaces, however does so through the mediation of "non-human sensory perception" rather than human senses via digital methods as perhaps is more common to us. In doing so, the film offers viewers an opportunity to question how digital - specifically mobile - media affects how physical space is perceived and experienced. In exposing audiences to "a LiDAR-mediated real", the film brings attention to the increasingly common sensory relationship between humans and machines, whilst creatively appropriating "non-human photography" or "an algorithmic visual gaze" for artistic purposes. Where the City Can't See utilises this effectively in exploring a fictional speculative world, an "anti-environment", and the social and political relationships that exist within it, and in doing so brings attention to the relationships between humans, digital technology and surveillance in the world that we live in.
As philosopher and theorist Marshall McLuhan suggests, "the role of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible... [and] the role of the artist is to create an anti-environment as a means of perception and adjustment". Once again I'm drawn back to the work of Pip Adams I encountered recently on fiction and the suggestion that through exploring the world via its lens that we can then get a clearer view of reality. Perhaps utilising these data-heavy, digital tools and modes of communication could allow us to reenvision and explore the unseen connections that exist in the world around us.
A few more notes from Hildebrand and Sheller's text:
- LiDAR "identifies but also blends subjects and objects into equally accountable formations. With extraordinary precision, the LiDAR mobile medium quantifies volumetric environments into efficiency models for mapping and remapping, surveying and surveilling. However, the distinct subjects and objects, surfaces, shapes, and their materialities are remediated as the same..."
- "The visual rhetoric of LiDAR seems to directly respond to McLuhan's observation that "Today man has no physical body. He is translated into information, or an image". As such, LiDar mediality is both compelling and uncanny, becoming against us and our heterogeneous lifeworlds to then model and mediate a detailed but homogenous object of informational accountancy." - "The film puts hybrid space into play as performative making and unmaking, visibility and invisibility, detection and evasion... As Young mentions, "the technology through which we experience the world also defines our cultural relationship to that world"." - "As different ways of seeing, moving and being in the world emerge with technological advancements such as LiDAR, our conceptual frameworks need revisiting, expanding and resituating. One of those foundational concepts is mobile media are and its role in illuminating and complicating past, present and emerging practices, processes, and principles."
- "The LiDAR-generated film operates on three levels: first, it presents the algorithmic logics and visual aesthetics of this mobile interface. Second, it exposes how those operations and mediations can be hacked and subverted. Third, it enacts a performative spatiality by hacking LiDAR cameras and visualisation technologies to create an anti-environment."
- "As the uptake and advancement of LiDAR technology continues, this kind of mobile media art can help increase awareness of the ways all kinds of machines are increasingly seeing, sensing, scanning, calculating and constructing us, the spaces through which we move, and the ways that we/it perceive the world"
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