AlexanderPorter

Proxybody (Dermawear)

Wearing the errors in a public 3D archive.

A collaboration with Simone C. Niquille carrying the distortions of rough 123D Catch self-portraits into garment patterns and physical objects.

Front and back garment panels covered with the distorted skin texture extracted from a rough public-domain 123D Catch self-portrait.
Scan texture projected onto garment pattern
Period
2015–2016
Status
Complete / Archived
Form
Wearable spatial-image collaboration

The project

A collaboration with Simone C. Niquille that carried textures from public-domain 123D Catch self-portraits into garment patterns and physical objects. The stretched photographs, missing geometry, and fused edges of the scans remained visible on the new surfaces.

Collaboration notes

What first interested me was a familiar human gesture: whenever a new representational technology appears, people seem compelled to test it on themselves. We put ourselves through the system and ask whether we recognize what comes back. A distorted self-portrait can teach us about the mirror that produced it. Because the input is familiar, the differences—the seams, omissions, and strange substitutions—make the system perceptible.

I watched this happen, and participated in it myself, as new 3D-scanning platforms emerged. What remained was an accidental public archive of rough bodies: self-portraits made partly to test the technology, then left behind. Proxybody/Dermawear began from my fascination with that archive and with what could happen when those incomplete skins were carried onto other forms.

Process study

Scans Become Skin

I used rough 123D Catch self-portraits as material for wearable surfaces, carrying the distortions and missing geometry of public scans from a reconstructed body onto garments.

Rough 123D Catch self-portrait of a tattooed, bearded man, with missing geometry and stretched photographic texture visible across the reconstructed torso.
Public-domain 123D Catch self-portrait scan
Front and back garment panels covered with the distorted skin texture extracted from a rough public-domain 123D Catch self-portrait.
Scan texture projected onto garment pattern

Alexander Porter — texture extraction, projection, and garment layouts. Developed as a collaboration with Simone C. Niquille; the source self-portraits were public-domain contributions to the 123D Catch archive.

  1. 01 / Starting point

    Rough public scans of bodies offered a strange material for something another body could wear.

  2. 02 / How it worked

    I worked with self-portraits people had published in the public domain through the 123D Catch archive. I extracted their photographic textures, preserved the stretching and gaps produced by the scans, and projected those surfaces onto front and back garment patterns.

  3. 03 / What it opened

    The garment layouts preserved the source photographs along with stretched textures, missing geometry, and fused edges. Fabrication moved those specific capture errors from a public 3D archive onto a surface that could be worn.

A person stands in a white room holding a large square image of layered bird wings in front of their body.
Proxybody III — Gallery delivery photographPhotograph by André Wunstorf; Proxybody III by Simone C. Niquille / Technoflesh.

My role

I extracted the photographic textures, developed the projection workflow, and produced the garment layouts. The work was developed as a collaboration with Simone C. Niquille; the source self-portraits were public-domain contributions to the 123D Catch archive.

Selected credits

Alexander Porter
Collaborator / Co-Creator
Simone C. Niquille
Collaborator / Co-Creator