A note on the project

Text by Tuure Leppänen and Xiao Zhiyu



According to Jonathan Crary, apparatuses for seeing are tools that shape the world around us both perception-wise and concretely. Camera obscura, for instance, was considered a tool for objective looking, a scientific eye, that encompassed in itself the ideology of the enlightenment era soon to come. Technology of today then, begs us a question as to what apparatuses for seeing in a virtual environment might imply for our understanding of the many presents we live in. Indeed, virtual worlds are spaces that are created in a relationship between computers and people, bringing a fragmentary notion of existence. The virtual and the program used to create it, like the camera obscura, are not a neutral playground. It is a sandbox that has been created with a set of rules placed by its creators. It is a world with its own boundaries that allow us to be, or limit the way we may operate.

There are two common techniques for generating a 3D model of a room. One is pursued by building the architecture from scratch, determining vectors, lines and faces individually, the other uses the LiDar depth sensible camera of a device to scan the room. These two methods generate equally different digital models, which correspond with the two editing modes featured in the program Blender: object edit and sculpture mode. They imply distinct ideologies of form, systems where the intersection of virtual objects is regulated by specific practices. While one is determined by the mathematical relationships which coordinate the positions of vectors, lines and faces, under an idea of control and measurement, the other is rather intuitive, working with the accountability of brushes and eyes. In this system, the generation of countless vectors determines more rhizomatic and fragmented relations between them, almost impossible to retrieve. While it is immediate to move from the first mode to the second, reversing the process is instead less linear. Their vectorial compound becomes harder to be traced and understood and thus, the whole process results in a general unbalance, constantly leaning from the controllable to the uncontrollable.

This process echoes the definition of body without organs, that Deleuze and Guattari delineated in their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) to express the potential of a body unregulated by the structures imposed by its constituent parts, the organs. What is controllable and uncontrollable then in the digital field of the virtual model? Where lies the boundaries between digital and organic and how organic processes can be adapted to digital systems?