by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart
The virtual camera is the gateway to the the virtual world. This
geometric, spatial world can only be viewed through the cyborg eye of a
virtual camera, which can be seen as another example of a technological
grotesque. A hybrid of the same sort of perspectival system developed
during the Italian Renaissance and a mathematical computer model, the
virtual world merges classicism and Cartesian rationalism, using a grid
and a coordinate system to map geometric objects into XYZ space.
The virtual camera in a 3D virtual imaging systems is embedded within
the software interface. In such software, the sculptural and
architectural world is seen only through different viewing portals. Each
portal is framed by controls identical to that of either an analog or a
digital camera, including depth of field, f-stop, and lens size that can
be fluidly shifted from macro to wide-angle or any dimension. The
virtual camera can do what the analog camera can do, and much more. It
is not constrained by worldly restrictions, meaning the actual physics
of optics, or the physical limits of a lens or a space or form. It can
be inside objects, and can look or travel through objects. Once a user
has created the architectural Cartesian world behind the camera, this
world can only be output by "photographing" it or, to use the language
of 3D simulation technology, by "rendering" it, thereby endowing it with
the various photographic qualities that the user has proscribed.
So simulation software doubles as a camera interface and proposes a
world that can not exist outside of mediation. The virtual space and the
cyborg-cinematic eye that records it are conjoined twins, simultaneously
constructing and defining the 3D space. This virtual world fused with
the cinematic eye that records it merge together to create a hybrid
medium. As a medium, post-photographic simulation is a form of sculpture
merged with photography, neither fish nor fowl but unique in itself.
Within the virtual world, one or many cameras can be placed anywhere in
any scene, moved along paths and into places that are phenomenologically
impossible. A camera can be shifted at any time, representing a sense of
multiplicity in which different viewpoints can be recorded
simultaneously to permit a "hyper-Cubist" spatial effect that is both
realistic yet fragmented. The physical possibilities of focal length,
angle of view, and depth of field effects can also be calculated,
manipulated, and wildly exaggerated. Any extreme of physical texturing,
including reflections of light, either of the virtual world or
hybridized with real-world photographic imagery, can be combined and
exaggerated beyond what is possible with an analog camera. In addition,
the virtual world is a computer model, literally mathematical and pure
in a geometric sense, without the flaws and irregularities of the
actual. As a result, surface materials appear otherworldly, and can be
hyper-glossy or possess of a seamless perfection. A camera can move in
such a way that is impossible in the physical world, unconstrained by
gravity, space, or form. Impossible cinematography such as recursive
loops, ceaseless, fluid or intricate movement, and views that are locked
to objects or placed inside physical forms, means that the omnipotent,
cyborg-cinematic eye is one without limits that can finally portray a
model of the user's mind.
by Pat Reynolds
The subjects of “photography” and what is referred to within the context
of this exhibition as “post-photographic simulation” (artworks created,
at least in part, through the use of various specialized 3D rendering
and animation softwares, but presented as still images, and often made
physical through the same printing technologies and techniques used in
“traditional” contemporary photographic works) have seen little
crossover regarding their institutional and critical reception and
presentation within the art world.
Artist, author, and Rhizome founder Mark Tribe applies the term “
new
media art” to “projects that make use of emerging media
technologies and are concerned with the cultural, political, and
aesthetic possibilities of these tools,” which he further defines as
work operating within the intersection of “Art and Technology and Media
art.” It is potentially this self-reflexive preoccupation with the
virtual that marks much simulated photography that has lead to its
continued categorization among new media works, rather than it being
primarily defined as a tangential or sub-categorical photographic form.
The art-historical photographic narrative seems to insist that
Photography, in the purest sense of the word, must involve the
transmission of “real,” physical light — whether through a lens, or an
aperture, or a direct surface-to-surface transfer, or a gridded series
or sensors programmed to translate varying intensities of
electromagnetic radiation into numerical digital information — into some
sort of image or transformed surface. This attachment to the physical is
reflected on an institutional level not only within the basic curricula
of photography programs at colleges and universities internationally,
but also among contemporary art museums and galleries seeking to both
define and legitimize cutting-edge and post-photographic practices. MoMA
Chief Curator of Photography Quentin Bajac
describes
the museum’s ongoing New Photography series of exhibitions as
encompassing “framed prints, images on screens, commercial books,
self-published books, zines, posters, photo-based installations and
videos, and site-specific works, and it will continue to present all the
different forms that the photographic image can take,” but the
exhibition has not (as of its 2015 edition) featured work that overtly
utilizes 3D simulation. Similar approaches to identifying the next wave
of photographic presentation and production can be seen within the
International Center of Photography’s 2014 What Is a Photograph?
exhibition, the artists in which, according to its
press
release, “have … confronted an unexpected revolution in the medium
with the rise of digital technology, which has resulted in imaginative
reexaminations of the art of analog photography, the new world of
digital images, and the hybrid creations of both systems as they come
together.” In this case as well, the exhibition, which aimed to trace
the evolution of contemporary photography from the 1970s to the present,
stopped just short of observable digital simulation in its curated
works.
It is tempting to preserve the necessary presence of the physical in
defining “true” photographic practices as an ongoing commitment to
photography’s purely analog origins. However, the movement toward a
fully simulated working environment and suite of tools could also be
argued as simply the next in a historically established (and ongoing)
series of steps marking photography’s technological evolution. For
nearly as long as photography has existed past the point of
trial-and-error experimentation, a definitive constant that has remained
alongside the presence of physical light has been the photographic
apparatus, which also serves as the model for the foundational set of
digital tools and parameters embedded within much professional 3D
simulation software. Because these pieces of software have been
primarily developed over time for advertising, filmmaking, and
commercial imaging industries, the user interfaces employed within each
program often employ a vocabulary that borrows from the workflows of
these sorts of productions. Users, in many cases, must choose a camera
with a lens of a defined focal length, and they must place it within the
same three-dimensional space as their eventual photographic subject,
which must also be lit using a variety of controllable light sources.
They define whether or not they want to shoot an uncompressed or
compressed image, and after creating an exposure, they can reframe their
shot or relight their subject. With the exception of the presence of
physical subjects and physical light, this process contains no more
artifice than that of the contemporary studio photography shoot, which
similarly consists of a defined composition of a chosen model in a
customizable space lit by artificial and controllable sources and output
as a generic digital file. Even simulated photographic work that eschews
the laborious lighting and rendering processes of programs like Maya and
Blender, such as Tribe’s own Rare Earth series of landscapes from war
video games or Clement Valla’s Postcards From Google Earth, often exists
as the product of one of a number of creative motivations often
attributed to photographers — archival impulses, seeking a so-called
“decisive moment”, recording a time and place in history, et cetera.
The degree to which post-photographic simulation should be considered a
form of photography or a distinct new media practice, like many other
nontraditional and technologically informed approaches to the medium,
will undoubtedly change over time, especially as the interfaces through
which artists engage with the technology continue to evolve. The
representation of the typical camera system as a means of organizing the
3D workflow is currently a defining element of software like Maya, but
it is also tied to present-day computer technologies and the interfaces
through which we engage with them. As augmented reality and other new
forms of hardware emerge in accessible consumer technologies, the
approaches that artists take in the creation and presentation of 3D
works will likely shift as well, presumably in a way that will lead to
similar discussions of the delineation between traditional and new 3D
modes of production.