“XYZ” Linoleum Print
Re-imaging physical landscapes
By taking a 3D printed mountain generated from photogrammetry, and using it to register the X, Y, and Z planes of three linoleum prints I hope to explore the idea of an evolving media from flat to spatial. The triptych represents an orthographic view of anobject typically found in modern 3D modeling programs. These two technologies of reproduction — printmaking and 3D printing — earmark opposite ends of the historical spectrum of mechanical reproduction. The act of merging the two is analogous to merely existing in a varied media landscape composed of old and new technologies, as many people exist today.
The contents of these prints represent a real, physical, wild mountain translated into 3D and re-translated into 2D. The transfiguration of the form of the mountain, representing untouched nature, but nevertheless captured, compressed, regurgitated, and reproduced by multiple image-making media points to the progressive translation of the entire Earth into an image. This mountain, a combination of atoms, was imported and transformed into bits into digital mesh as a .STL file, exported once more to a 3D printer, which again transfigured it into atoms. Finally, another import of sorts of the 3D model reframes the model as outline and stamp, able to replicate the shadow of its former self, many layers removed from the real thing it represents, resulting in this 2D analog print.
How does this processing of the image of the physical terrain affect our relation to it? NASA’s ATS-3 satellite took the first color photograph of the whole Earth in 1967, which drastically affected how individuals and nations saws themselves on the planet. As philosopher David Loy remarked, “It implied a new kind of self awareness.”
As governments and large corporations enact further imaging techniques on the Earth, how does that affect our “self awareness of it” and ultimately how does that awareness come back and strike a material change in the environment? As the surface of the area of the earth is painted with photographic remnants from iPhones, drones, and satellites what happens to the earth? Is the earth doomed to become a simulacra of its previous self, or is there something more grounding, atomic, and physical, like a screenprint, that can come out of it? “XYZ” is a work which is tender motion towards my nascent thinking in this field.
