This small-group video project was produced in Autodesk Maya using open-source models and photogrammetry to take a stance on the relationship between the individual and their surroundings in this increasingly digital world. We take the environments of the home, the work-space, the server room (a physical space of the digital realm) and the post-natural as spaces which have equal agency to the individual. The slow pan across reveals each subsequent environment as the "peghuman" individual experiences them. This pan concludes at a final amalgamation where the spaces are indistinguishable and the peghuman is seen from a very different perspective.
We designed our peghuman as a proxy for a human viewer such that a viewer can imagine themselves in our designed environments. The peghuman is placed in environments which call back to spaces of daily life. In these digital spaces, the peghuman and the environment take on aspects of one another to form overlapping and changing identities.
The condition captured in the video draws upon the progression of immersive media, particularly ideas of displacement, allowing the peghuman to exist, suspended, in an illusory environment. Through the cut-in scenes we produce a dislocation of place and time, disrupting the smooth progression from one state to another.
Eventually the peg and environment fracture into multiple overlapping identities, converging into an "exquisite corpse." These multifaceted identities assert themselves onto one another to produce a complex and obfuscated reading of the distinction between peg and environment. This camouflaging also serves to highlight the equal agency of both the peghuman and environment in this digital realm, speaking to the idea of dark ecologies as eliminating the hierarchy of the human entity.
The images above were produced during the process of developing the peghuman's textures as a series of adapting overlays.
Below details one of the objects produced with photogrammetry from original photographs (left) to final integration (right).
One of many photos for photogrammetry model
One of many photos for photogrammetry model
Early integration of photogrammetry model into a scene
Final integration in the academic scene
