Mechanical Eye: Week 05
[1] During the formative weeks of Dana’s Mechanical Eye studio, the task to choose a ‘sight’ of significance had proven to be a bit of a challenge. Settling into a new city to begin graduate school, there was undoubtedly no sight of significance accessible to the naked eye. Assuming I had no choice but to recruit some help from family or friends back home, I let the prompt gestate for a few days. The idea struck me as I was taking a drive in the family van, reflecting on the unexpected events that led to its inclusion in my journey to New Haven.
The interior space of the van was a piece of home I had voyaged to grad school with, a time capsule of fond memories of family and friends. During my childhood, the Sienna had provided transportation for hockey games, family vacations, and holiday dinners. It was the vehicle I learnt to drive in and pivotal for any change in living arrangement throughout the years. The Sienna is a portal back to Canada, and an extension of the house I grew up in.
Though it quickly became clear that this was destined to be my starting point for Dana’s studio, my true emotional connection to the silver stallion was something I had uncovered months ago during the long trip London Ontario (my hometown), to New Haven Connecticut. Though I had started the year working/living in Brooklyn, inevitably the pandemic forced me back to Canada for the summer. At the end of July, I eventually made the 12 hour drive from London, to Brooklyn, to New Haven. It was on that day that I found myself driving across the Brooklyn Bridge after the sun had set, staying awake purely from the adrenaline of the Manhattan skyline at night. The thrill of that moment simultaneously put the entire trip and my relationship with the space I had been occupying for the better half of the day, in perspective.
~ In reflecting on the exhilaration of this experience, the idea of capturing data from a replicated journey could be an interesting entry point to unknown virtual terrain.
[2] My First attempt to capture the space was through photogrammetry. I used my phone (a Google Pixel 3) to take two sets of images. The first set was a simple 360 degree capture of the van itself (fig. 1), and the second was a series of interior shots of the vehicle (fig. 2). Both sets (40 images and 100 images respectively) were processed using Autodesk Recap to varying degrees of success (fig. 3, fig. 4).
To get a grasp of the overall photogrammetry process, my initial photoshoot of the van was followed through with loose structure. It should be noted that the keys to a successful photoshoot were established afterwards, and will be more closely adhered to on secondary attempts. More specifically it was challenging to shoot with ambient lighting due to the continual penetration of daylight into the vehicle, however parking in a shaded area helped mitigate that issue. I similarly found it tricky to avoid panorama-type shooting, as the cramped space of the van didn’t lend to the ‘walk and shoot’ style that was emphasized in most of the ‘dos and don’t’ of photogrammetry found online. The dominating monotones of the grey interior also broke the rule of differentiated surfaces. In short, pending a surprising Recap model, I was already considering using a better method for scanning the space as I was shooting photos.
The primary dilemma in capturing my space virtually is the fact that the important objects for capture also comprise an incredibly tight boundary of circulation throughout the space. Assuming my haphazard scan would lead to unintelligible results, the biggest surprise of my first attempt at capturing the space was the level of fidelity achieved in select portions of the Recap model. (fig. 5) I thought there was enough promising evidence to warrant another attempt at a scan, but I also wanted to try another method of scanning to avoid spinning my wheels with Recap. Future scans will be conducted in the following week.
[3] Although I wouldn’t describe my observation of the tight interior space as a ‘discovery,’ it could definitely be considered a reorientation (precursor to the impending digital reorientation). In scanning the vehicle, I was forced to engage with the space in a new way and it reinforced the contrasting scale of my body and the space itself. In having to crawl from capture-point to capture-point, craning my limbs and performing quasi-gymnastics, I felt as though a motion capture of the task at hand could be an entire project unto itself. What was truly amazing was the fact that 7 people in the same space could operate a far more smooth production of movement than my single-handed clumsy photo-shoot.
~The humor of this situation led to the idea of recording 7 bodies entering and exiting the van, in an attempt to simulate this production of movement.
The spectrum of quality that makes up the jumbled Recap model lives temporarily in Maya (fig. 6), however it’s permanent home will be the deleted folder on my computer. That being said, both Recap and Maya allowed me to reflect on the angle chosen for each photo, and how I might better position myself for future scans. I also took the liberty of requesting an Artec scanner from the YSOA to try another method of scanning space. This will be explored in the weeks to come.
[4] ~My ideas for this project are quickly developing as both the synthesis of visual information and that of kinetic information.
In a similar fusion between the kinetic and the visual, Alasdair Turner (2003) provides a pertinent study on visibility analysis that introduced me to the minds of Phillip Thiel, James Gibson, and Michael Benedikt. Thiel and Benedikt both offer up distinction between object and environment in regards to spatial perception. Theil emphasizes a “discursive or sequential quality of … visual experience” (33) that can be understood through a combination of three “space-establishing elements”: surfaces, screens, and objects. (Thiel, 35)
Understanding the interior space of the van through this lens helps dissolve my programmatic understanding of the van (i.e its vehicularness). I can begin to rebuild the interior as a series of 9 interior screens that bound a general x/y plane of objects, z-bounded by two surfaces (the floor and ceiling). This new understanding of the space changes my perception of how I might capture the space itself.
Thiel then describes a spectrum of “explicitness” in spatial definition, defined by the two poles; the vague and the volume. (Thiel, 39) The former describing an ambiguity of mostly objects in a field, and the latter describing a “completely defined” space bounded by “contiguous” surfaces.
The van provides a mix between the two definitions, where clearly defined surfaces of the floor and ceilings merely sandwich floating screens and objects. One’s sense of interiority stems from the exterior perspective of the van as an object that is now inhabited. Shifting this perspective to that of David Chalmers’s “naïve viewer” (319), prompts the question: how would one understand the space of the van without prior knowledge of its program as a vehicular container?
A final note that I took from Thiel was his description of the human as analogous to the phonograph pickup, whose “movement realizes the experience.”(Thiel, 33) Turner underscores this idea by citing Gibson’s optic flow as a method of “guiding individual through a landscape.” (Turner, 660) Gibson “see’s movement as essential to perception of the environment.” (660)
The peculiar thing about the van lies in how it ignores Thiel’s poetics; Movement of the human does not always ‘realize the experience’. The experience of the van interior becomes a visual spectacle of screens which display the outside world, and the passenger need not move in order to experience this. That being said the driver’s movement determines the experience, which can in turn influences the upper-body movement of the passenger. In the van, there becomes a non-linear, symbiotic, relationship between movement and experience.
Furthermore, the movement in the van that influences perception is quite alien from the typical movement-influencer (i.e walking and looking) that Thiel outlines. The turn of the head or shift of the hand on the steering wheel provide examples of a movement in the van that is both minimal and tactile. These movements also typically require a third party object or mechanical process (i.e the steering wheels) to have full perceptual impact.
~In the van, experience is tied to the cooperative relationship between machine and human.
[Works Cited]
Chalmers, David. “the Virtual and the Real” Disputatio 9, 46 (2017): 309–352
Thiel, Philip. “A Sequence-Experience Notation: For Architectural and Urban Spaces.” The Town Planning Review 32, no. 1 (1961): 33–52.http://www.jstor.org/stable/40102300.
Turner, Alasdair. “Analysing the Visual Dynamics of Spatial Morphology.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 30, no. 5 (2003): 657–76. Https://doi.org/10.1068/b12962.
