Translocation series, 2018-19
Translocation explores moments experienced and captured on the natural landscape through high-resolution UAV (drone) cameras. Images and video are re-imagined through video sound design, creative coding, sculpture, and augmented and mixed reality. I am interpreting the human experience as it relates to, influences and occurs in the natural world.
Perception is a driving force of this work. I believe that through our actions, we ultimately alter and lose perspective of the natural world, replacing it with simulacra or altered narratives that are incompatible with its true natural aesthetic. The act of digitally-manipulating moments in time and place augment and ensure temporality of the documented natural world, altering its existence without recognition of its original natural state. This series of images explores ideas of how we perceive our surrounding world whilst losing sight of its inherent beauty and value.
In 2018, I travelled to Costa Rica with botany colleagues and a student of mine, to test the effectiveness of using UAV (drone) cameras to document hard-to-see tree and plant species and nutrient-rich ecosystems. The ultimate goal and success of the project relied on our ability to prove that scholars can see and catalog plant and animal species ~70-100 meters above the ground, in dense, tropical rainforest ecosystems, using inexpensive-digital methods. Our work showed that such research could be done without the usual costs and “red tape” associated (permits, plant damage, scaring animals, etc.) with climbing into protected rainforests.
Translocation: UAV series
Digital imagery, After Effects, p5js, 2018.
Each frame, sequence, interaction and image is a window into our witnessing and perception of the natural world – its origin, its story, and its future – creating a blur across time, person and place. Such distorted views may also be analogized to our digitally driven and augmented perceptions of ourselves, our culture, ideas of community, and our reliance on technology.
This series of images explores ideas of how we perceive our surrounding world whilst losing sight of its inherent beauty and value. This work uses high-resolution aerial images and videos captured with UAVs (drones) in the forests of La Selva Biological Research Station, Parque Nacional Barbilla, and along Cahuita National Park along the Caribbean Coast in Costa Rica. The images and video are then augmented as a motion graphic using Adobe After Effects, and then captured as still images.
Translocation: Particulates
Digital imagery, p5js, OpenGL, digital print, 2018.
Each frame, sequence, interaction and image is a window into our witnessing and perception of the natural world – its origin, its story, and its future – creating a blur across time, person and place. Such distorted views may also be analogized to our digitally driven and augmented perceptions of ourselves, our culture, ideas of community, and our reliance on technology.
This series further augments the same high-resolution aerial images and videos captured with UAVs (drones) through OpenProcessing (p5js visual programming language), and using OpenGL to explore the footage in 3-dimensional and motion graphic spaces.
Whisper to My Thirsty Lips
Digital Imagery, photo illustration, p5js, OpenGL motion graphic as video projection or image stills as digital prints, 2018.
Part of the Translocation series, this data-driven creative coding and motion graphic work explores how we, people perceive the natural world’s inherent beauty and value as a faint whisper.
Perception is a driving force of this work. I believe that through our actions, we ultimately alter and lose perspective of the natural world, replacing it with altered narratives that are sometimes unrecognizable simulacra of its true natural aesthetic.