Topography / 2021–present
Alexander Porter: spatial documentary and volumetric filmmaking
Place Becomes Protagonist Topography
01 / 12
I often begin with a place or an experience that conventional cameras cannot capture, then find the forms and tools it needs.
I like to bend photogrammetry, volumetric capture, computer vision, and game technologies toward stories of place, memory, power, and ecology. The work may become a film, live performance, installation, interactive world, software tool, or workshop. I spend time with people, landscapes, archives, images, and sounds, then ask what form the material needs. A recording made for a film can enter a performance; a scanning tool can become the basis of an installation. The forms produce material for one another. I make many of these projects with close collaborators, and I’m also interested in the way a tool can carry a practice beyond the things I make with it myself.
Recent Experiments
A loose feed of screenshots, prototypes, tests, and small studies from work in progress.
Strata / Installation
Strata Installation — visitor within dark scanned terrain
A 2026 visualization testing how movement can reveal scanned terrain, recorded walks, and documentary layers inside the developing installation.
See project ↗
Smooth Blair Witch
Smooth Blair Witch — LARPA screening documentation
A full-length stabilization experiment: every shot of The Blair Witch Project moves across a widened canvas, gradually painting the forest around it.
See project ↗More selected work
All projects ↗
Strata / Installation
Strata is an immersive installation that transforms the Badlands of South Dakota into an explorable landscape.
Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
Styles and Customs of the 2020s
Four speculative worlds connected by a firelit cave.
Virtual Reality Director
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
The Changing Same
A magical-realist virtual-reality work moving through four centuries of racial injustice, resistance, memory, and possible futures.
Co-Executive Producer / Technical Director
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
Curio Aquarium
The Harvard Mark II relay moth became a cabinet of handmade software creatures, reconstructed in three dimensions and released into a shared artificial-life aquarium.
Creative / Technical Collaborator
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Commissioned collaborations
KFC: 11 Secrets
An alternate-reality campaign that sent audiences from a Matty Matheson film into codes, hidden websites, real locations, and the mythology of KFC’s secret recipe.
Creative Director / Puzzle-System Design
Timberland X Stüssy Interactive
A WebGL experience for the 2013 Stüssy for Timberland boot, with rotation moving the captured figures from glass-like surfaces into disintegration.
Director of Photography / VFX Supervisor / Interaction Designer
Questions made tangible
Camera of the Future
In a world where every device can see, what is a camera?
Workshop Co-Lead / Curator
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Learning Lab: Mars Base
An immersive educational environment offering dynamic course topics on demand.
Project Lead
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Fitzania
A tracked, glowing orb turned a preventive-health check into a game for the Museum of Future Government Services.
Physical Design Lead
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
“This speculative framing, an improvised soundtrack by guitar maestro Bill Frisell, and Alexander Porter’s evocative photogrammetry all contribute to a singular, beautiful and immersive nonfiction work.”— Mandy Rose, Immerse News
“I saw the metal pole in VR and I grabbed it in real life. It was so natural, and so simple a gesture, but it put me right in that car mentally.”— Kelly Ohannessian, UploadVR
Work together
I love collaborating and take on selected commissions, consulting, workshops, and teaching. I’m especially interested in projects that need a new visual, spatial, or technical language.