Since I fell in love with the AREBYTE Gallery space, I spoke with the curator and she told me about a workshop using Blender to 'break' photorealism (a really good excuse to go back). The workshop was free (thank fuck) and taught me a lot. Marc Blazel and Shinji Toya first showed us a video called Goodbye Uncanny Valley to help us understand the context around CGI, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. The video questions post-truth, post-cinema and theoretical photorealism. With this in mind, we then discussed the 'digital grotesque' (lucky for me as I look at the grotesque and the uncanny in my work). Marc then introduced us to a few digital artists, some I knew, and some I didn't, some were in the exhibition I visited earlier that week at AREBYTE.
We all opened up Blender (a community-based, free, open source software for 3D modelling) and opened a file containing a 'photorealistic' deer. He showed us the basic navigating controls in the software and some key tools we would need to 'break' the deer. We used found images online to lay as a UV file to alter the skin on the deer figure. I first chose one with rows of windows and then chose one of slime. The slime was fun. There were so many simple aspects that took away the cleanliness of typical CGI and morphed the poor deer into some abstract form. After the skin, we edited the figure. I bent it's legs, stretched the antlers, and twisted it's nose as a basic remodelling of the original file. This was distorted, but not broken and so I opened a new file and overlaid the skin. This time, I removed the fur texture to make the deer smooth and glossy and stretched and pulled the deer in all directions to make a completely figureless form.
After our individual experiments, we discussed collaborative editing. We each set up our laptops at our seats, opened a chosen file containing an object (a phone, a can, vegetables). We had 30 seconds on each laptop to distort the object, and then moved onto the next object on the next laptop. This meant each laptop, by the end, had had 10 people or so edit the form one after another. The majority of the pieces were unrecognisable from the original model.
We settled in our own seats again and Shinji handed out some paperwork. We chose questions to answer and think of potential ways of breaking photorealism within Hollywood. I was sat with a game designer and a digital engineer so we discussed horror games and making films with 'dirty' models (CGI that are unpolished and rough polygons) and how this could lead to far more interesting and thought-provoking games and films.
These collaborative works and our individual ons were then send via email to Marc who is going to upload them into a digital gallery for an exhibition for the workshop. This will be on the AREBYTE Gallery website.
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