FIRMAMENT
FIRMAMENT
Since the advent of Virtual Reality’s adoption for use in Journalism it has been positioned as a panacea to compassion fatigue, and named an empathy machine. This work was created as a strategy to speak to the impact of technology on the mediation of facts, as a way to discuss the societal and human effects of our relationship to intimate technologies. FIRMAMENT seeks to pull apart the theatrics if the technology and render it down to a lo-fi viewing of what was originally Virtual Reality news content. Then the viewer, no longer encumbered by the novel aspects of the apparatus of VR, can consider the scene that has been captured in relation to the novelty of the technology of delivery itself.
Colmap_Projection
Colmap_Projection is a creative output of this research that is driven by a desire to explore and visualise the algorithmic processes that drive targeted news and control our spheres of viewing the artwork. Using Bundler Structure From Motion a system for photogrammetry from unordered image collections, to explore algorithm driven structure technology mediating perception and the limitations of access and format. Bundler takes a set of images, image features, and image matches as input, and produces a 3D reconstruction of camera and sparse scene geometry as output. The system reconstructs the scene incrementally, a few images at a time using a feature-based multiple view reconstruction vision algorithm. Here thorough the use of Bundler the algorithm takes on the role of the auditor and presents a computational viewing of a complex human event, though the end result is impenetrable.
String work
On October 9th 2017, facebook’s ‘Social Virtual Reality chief’ Rachel Franklin and CEO Mark Zuckerberg each put on an oculus rift and broadcast live on Facebook its new virtual reality platform ‘Facebook Spaces’. They were virtually transported to the moon to experience the wonder of space, to Zuckerberg’s house to see his dog and then to Puerto Rico – to tour the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Appearing on 360 footage shot by NPR journalists the pair where superimposed into the scene to discuss what Facebook was doing to aid relief, including donating 1.5 million dollars. They appeared as cartoon floating characters, taking selfies, laughing and high fiving.
This hacking together of crude salesmanship and technological novelty in a portmanteau of cartoon sympathy is profoundly disturbing. Perhaps virtual reality and immersive journalism is simply the newest package wrapped around the old complications of visual journalism, documentary, spectatorship and exploitation. Maybe though it is potentially more dangerous because of its appearance as a false alternative.
Where the industrialisation of weaving from capital pressure resulted in the creation of the Punch Card Loom, a precursor to the modern computer, by Joseph Marie Jacquard. Previous machines such as the Draw Loom were slow and labour-intensive, with practical limitations on the complexity of the pattern and required more specialized labour. Jacquard recognized that although weaving was intricate, it was repetitive, and saw that a machine could be developed for the production of sophisticated patterns just as it had been done for the production of simple patterns. In String work, seminal images from the relationship between facebook and oculus rift are run through an open source algorithmic drawing pattern created by artist Petros Verillis.
The algorithm takes digital image as input and outputs a knitting pattern for a circular loom. Over 2 billion calculations are needed to produce each pattern, not much of a load for a modern computer, but an impossible task without one. The patterns are drawn and undrawn in a single thread running continuously from one anchor point to another 4000 times and projected onto a suspended photographic scrim so the projection is visible on both sides, but throws only ambient light with no spill projection.
