I like to bend photogrammetry, volumetric capture, computer vision, and game technologies toward stories of place, memory, power, and ecology.

Technical images

I work with tools built to measure, model, track, or control: 3D scanners, computer vision, geographic data, game engines, surveillance systems, robotics, and maps.

In the Camera of the Future workshop, I would ask students to name the most common camera. They would suggest phones, consumer cameras, or security cameras. At the time, I believed it was the optical mouse: a tiny, very close camera trained on the texture of the surface beneath it. Technical cameras are already operating around us in forms we do not necessarily recognize as cameras.

Graphs, maps, scans, and other technical images can appear to be the world itself rather than an interpretation of it. I am interested in misapplying tools of capture: questioning their claim to perfect accuracy while making images their designers did not anticipate.

The experimental photographer in Vilém Flusser's Towards a Philosophy of Photography tries to play against the apparatus, putting something into the image that was not already inscribed in its program. I find that useful. A tool defines a possibility space. Modification becomes expressive, and sometimes required, when the image, story, or encounter I want lies outside that space. I modify the tool, and the modification itself becomes expressive.

At Scatter, we made that an intentional practice: imagine what we wanted to create, then reverse-engineer the tools that would need to exist. I still work that way.

I work in immersive media and remain critical of it. There is a theme in VR about evading the world and checking out of real life. I use these systems to return to a place, hold several perspectives at once, or inspect how an image was made.

What makes it documentary

What makes something documentary when it is not a film? For me, one part of the answer is the truth claim the work makes. I think documentary sits somewhere between journalism and pure fiction. It is an interpretive form grounded in the real world and the stories of other people. Ideally it is humble about the director's subjectivity and foibles.

I want someone encountering the work to understand that a real person spoke from experience and that an environment existed. The work should maintain a certifiable relationship between its claims and the world. Where something is interpretive—a person describing an experience, for example—that should be clear. The material should be situated more or less honestly.

I accept those constraints and still want the work to be imaginative, surreal, or strange. A documentary does not have to be a linear film. Interactive work can represent a complex system by allowing someone to enter it, make choices, and see what those choices do. It can use games, staging, metaphor, and visualization while retaining a documentary sensibility.

My virtual environments begin with photographs, films, scans, maps, field recordings, and testimony. On In Restless Dreams, I inferred a room from a roll of 35mm photographs. For Truth or Consequences, we rebuilt locations from handheld documentary footage. For Strata, over 5,000 photographs became a fifty-meter patch of the Badlands. The scan is another interpretation, and I am responsible for what I decide to hide or show.

Building the tool a story requires

Early RGB-D rigs paired a color camera with a Kinect sensor. The cameras had to stay aligned, so I designed mounts, published plans, and sold assembled kits. That work led from RGBDToolkit to Depthkit, a volumetric-capture system used by artists and filmmakers around the world.

Making the tool adds another layer to the art practice. When someone uses a tool I helped create to make something I could not have imagined, I think of them as a faint collaborator. Their work remains their own. In a distant sense, it also extends the practice beyond the things I made with the tool myself.

Production kept changing the system. Blackout needed recorded passengers to hold together while a viewer moved through a subway car. Zero Days VR placed a live depth image of the viewer across a virtual table. The Changing Same used a live composite so actors, camera crew, and remote directors could share a virtual location.