Digital Realities_

Gaussian Splats (noun)
"A rendering technique that represents a 3D scene as millions of soft volumetric points (“splats”), each storing spatial and material information such as color, opacity, normals, and reflective properties, allowing realistic lighting and view-dependent appearance from different camera angles."

My photo portfolio explores the use of gaussian splats not as perfect reconstructions of our physical world, but as a medium for showing emotion and stylisation where the reconstructions themselves are the art and not the source scene. For a while now, the advances in digital realism and 3d spaces have been centred around making a place feel more indistinguishable from reality, however in more recent years with projects like EXSII people and artist have found where to break away from that realism to enhance emotion and storytelling. Similar to this I have chosen to create works that focus on the instability and memory-like aspects of gaussians, taking slight inspiration from the work of mark Kimber’s works such as slide-show valley and the cloud chamber, using the abnormalities in gaussian splats to find and create new meaning from where the captures have errored. I feel that different to how traditional photography works, capturing gaussians is like capturing someone else’s feelings, the spaces and 3 dimensional elements are inferred rather than being solidly recorded with precision, this can lead to the captures being dream like if viewed from the right angle, the viewer of the image becomes not just aware of the scene but also of the systems trying to recreate it. I think that this series also reflects the state of digital media’s shift away from perfect realism to a renaissance of stylisation and intentional perception from distortion and breaking the illusions that are now almost perfected. The biggest examples of such shifts can be seen in the VR industry. In 2020 the game “half-life Alyx” came out with realistic visuals that fully immersed the viewer in the world. Now we have projects such as GANGSTALK which use different breakages of reality to create different feelings and emotions, for example, in the game, UI can become part of the world and becomes part of the experience through sticking the flat planes to specific coordinates. It is not realistic, in fact it breaks the immersion of this experience, but it adds so much to the emotional feel and the world.

In intentionally revealing the fractures beneath digital realism, my portfolio, and the other examples I have shown, change the errors of reconstruction into intention and emotion.