(for playback in browsers, I recommend right-clicking the video and selecting "loop" for continuous playback; may not work in Safari though)
continuing with the idea of mapping, translation, the slippage between reality, object & translation, perception and actuality, etc.
this scan was taken from an oak tree in the Domain - I was drawn to an interesting spiderweb that was built across a knot in the wood
the scan, like other LIDAR captures I've taken recently, captured the surface of the wood, and has created a digital idea of what the underside of it may be beyond it. I find the inside-outside/digitally-imagined object really curious; it feels a little surreal - the detail is both incredibly accurate and a little too real, while the shape is both authentic in its capture and completely wrong
to me, there's some kind of nice parallel between the idea of a machine "image-ining" an object's properties and us as human beings maintaining a curiosity about the natural world (including the unseen parts of it that escape visibility or comprehension). It's interesting to me thinking about the bark itself as a skin of sorts, and the LIDAR capturing a digital "skin" of an environment/object/etc. in the process of building a scan.
the wood feels like a landscape in the video below (higher resolution video coming soon), which for the spider that lives there may be the case (Is it worth thinking about things like that, or is that bordering on green romanticism?). There are moments where the bark feels like it's warping or moving of its own accord
I think when we capture something digitally like this, we capture the idea of it as seen through the device, and the language of that technological view creates a sort of mythological object... in doing this repeatedly, I think we build a broader conceptual idea/sign(?) of the thing, which may not be as authentic as the original that was being capturing but that holds its own power nonetheless... sometimes perhaps negative, sometimes positive. It's interesting to me though...
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