Research Trip¶
Info
A one-week residency in La Grand Maison Rouge located in La Cerdagne, right on the border between Spain and France. This was not a coincidence since the topic of the exploration was about margins, and the way they interact both as a space to divide and connect. During the week we have been guided by Mercè Rua, director of the Maison, our lecturer Thomas Duggan, and locals who introduced us to artisanal techniques.
Team
Annna Lozano Martinez & Nicolò Baldi
doYouSeePatterns¶
Changing context helps to clear to your mind, and it helps to notice things you didn’t before. Since I stepped into this region, I couldn’t stop noticing the incredible amount of geometries of nature around me. This instinctive fascination slowly turned into my area of experimentation during the week, as I started to pay more and more attention to these details.
Digital Moss¶
The “border” that we selected to inquire during the week is the one in between digital and physical, virtual and analog. We kept playing and oscillating between these two dimensions, switching from one direction to the other and trying to explore what happens in between.
In the initial days, we gathered small natural samples like rocks, rotting wood, dry moss, and dead leaves to examine them more closely. One vehicle we used to deep dive into their patterns and textures was 3D scanning, to unveil what we could only perceive: the samples rotates itself on a platform while the sensor captures their geometries, creating virtual representation of it. It turned out that this translation and interpretation process from the machine that was reconstructing the geometry of the object resembled us the behaviour of the moss itself. From the screen we have been able to witness the birth of the 3d model progressively assuming the shape of the original sample.
Phygital Photography¶
Once collecting a significant amount of scans, we asked ourself: what happens if we insert the digital in between the physical and the analog (phsyical → digital → analog)? Is there a way to materially represent the results we obtained through this digital process?
Having available a darkroom for photographic development in the Maison, we decided to make an experiment: can we impress on photographic paper these textures?
We then used a projector to display our processed textures, rendered as 3D meshes or point clouds, and quickly positioned some photographic paper in front of it. It turned out that it was possible! We managed to catch the virtual texture into an analog mean! UwU
Since this proved to be quite exciting we decided to go through, and we used an old analog camera to photograph these projections overlaid on the original samples, blending the physical and virtual geometries so seamlessly that they became indistinguishable. This was also a wonderful chance to experiment the traditional process of photographic development in darkroom.
Final Exposition¶
We selected the Maison Rouge’s boiler room to display our project for the final exposition. This was the space in which the project was born, and its inherent darkness and isolation from the rest of the building created a mystical atmosphere on the space.
The exhibition featured our photographic films, a composition made of collected samples, our “Digital Moss” short film, a series of images of the process, and an interactive area where visitors could experiment with digital textures on the physical samples.
The abandoned fridge in the boiler turned out to be the perfect space to display our project, since the light was captured inside its chamber and created a new tridimensional shape. (lol)