SCANLAB PROJECTS / Remote Relic: Observation 01 and 02, 2020
PRESENTING EKO 8 ART PROJECTS
SCANLAB PROJECTS / Remote Relic: Observation 01 and 02, 2020
pointcloud animation on two screens
“We haven’t been there.
But our machines have”
In a world where google tourism is the norm, we often get a photographic glimpse of our destination before we arrive. Sometimes the satellite capture or street view is unappealing enough to alter our travel plans, or so inspiring we divert course. These aren’t guidebooks, these are mass data collection exercises, delivering briefly collected, automatically edited versions of place.
The future of these datasets is three dimensional. As the eyes of a billion future autonomous vehicles and handheld/head-worn devices, LIDAR 3D scanning is the tool that will make these future models. A perpetually updated digital doppelganger of the world grows every second, with more populous places more saturated with higher frequency updates, and the less visited (by machines or humans) remaining relatively unmapped.
Remote Relic at the MTT explores the infancy of this new digital world. Highly detailed fragments of spatial understanding drop into our consciousness but they do not solidify into a complete site or comprehensive history. They aren’t navigable by foot or vehicle, they are flailing around, ungrounded in a digital void …
ScanLAB Projects is a pioneering creative practice, half art studio, half research laboratory, led by artists/architects/technologists Matthew Shaw and William Trossell. ScanLAB’s primary medium is LIDAR 3D scanning, a form of machine vision that they argue is the future of photography and spatial representation. LIDAR which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a remote sensing method that uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure distance. Digital sensors capture the information with extraordinary levels of precision. As the electronic eyes for billions of mobile phones and driverless vehicles, 3D LIDAR scanners are the cartographers of the future. By critically observing places and events through the eyes of these machines ScanLAB’s work hopes to glance at the future we will all inhabit.
They were invited to respond to the interior spaces of the MTT and have worked locally in Maribor with KIBLA2LAB to document the spaces without ScanLAB leaving their COVID-19 imposed lockdown in the United Kingdom. For this new two-screen work they have created a glimpse into the phenomenal resolution in which all abandoned and inaccessible spaces may be mapped in future.
