Simulacra: Memory and Excess in the Hyperreal
How can we navigate the potential of digitality without losing sight of or giving up on a world that we have devastated? It is inevitable that we would have to find alternate paths of survival and creation to offset the consequences of the anthropocene after the visceral deterioration of ecology and resources. Living in a reality where planned obsolescence is very much built into our systems, there is a false equivalence between
the ideas of ‘newness’ and ideas of ‘progress’. where systemic failures, exploitation and breakage are buried under the shadows of success. In the spirit of Broken World Thinking and moving past the facade of novelty growth, how do we “take breakdown and decomposition as our starting point, in order to find an
equilibrium” between our rates of devastation and the fragility of the world we inhabit? this project aims to explore these concepts through the lens of speculative fiction - utilizing the genre as an analogy for the present, and a tool to project a potential imagined future.
Electronic Waste
The initial direction of the project was cemented by a desire to conduct a study on the life-cycle of matter
and the notion of “waste” materials. How can we begin to imagine a different approach to the notion of the
disposable and the unwanted? Through establishing an understanding of value systems associated with “waste”,
we can begin to separate value into various categories, from monetary to sentiment, a resource to be used
in place of excavation. As Jennifer Gabrys stated in her book, Digital Rubbish, a natural history of electronics: “Seeing it as a process involving transformation and remainder, not erasure through expenditure.”
In the study of material transformations and the relationships that exist in between, an archive will be created to document and represent our cycles of consumption and waste-generation, to visualize how ‘uselessness’ and ‘valuelessness’ are determined, as well as to grapple with the process of preservation
and the fluctuation of attitudes towards these objects. A hypothetical electronic waste processing plant will act as a vessel for the consideration and management of physical electronic waste. to evaluate these seemingly different states of existence within one perspective, a third space will serve as a lens through which the physical can exist alongside elements of virtuality.
A Third Space: Speculative Fiction as a Lens
United under the common category of waste, a core problem in processing physical electronic waste and digital waste is the differing forms in which they exist. In order to take a holistic view of the subject matter, the format of film will be utilized as a third space of existence, one that is bound but not limited to the physical rules of our reality, one that can allude to lived dilemmas through attempts at an aesthetic sublime. Precedent studies were conducted via analyzing film-making techniques used in prominent speculative fiction films, in order to determine the exact processes that contribute to the building of a spectacular, convincing reality.
Worldbuilding Through the Digital Diorama
Working with tangible materials offers an innate set of rules for manipulation, something that is often emulated in the digital rendering to achieve realism. As a beginning step, the act of worldbuilding
takes place through an entirely digital format. The creation of an ‘illusion’ becomes the representational
key to framing this project, utilizing the imperfection of the physical form to obscure and communicate. The digital dioramas serve as a substrate that will eventually be transformed by the limitations of physical materiality and the boundaries of a defined lens. In order to cross thresholds and blur the seams that exist between these forms of representation, film-making techniques such as lighting design, framing, backdrops, matte shots, flats, and age-old techniques like anamorphic projection will be adapted and applied.
Texture Mapping and Object Projection
by beginning with a blender model, limits of realism were experimented with through the seemingly limitless creative potential of the digital, setting a general atmosphere to be experienced, taking inspiration from the many film-making techniques that have been utilized throughout centuries to present convincing illusions of sight.
Constructing the Third Space
in the setting up of an illusion, anamorphic projections are relied upon as a technique to blur the lines between the digital and the physical, the two dimensional and the three dimensional. a 3d model was used to configure the points of projection from a desired, predetermined framing, resulting in mapped model texturing
that will reveal a seemingly hidden object - only when viewed from an exact perspective.
