Imaginary Explosions
Vistas

Computational photography is an uncanny digital memory missing the skin of photorealism. Instead of light focused through a lens, computational photography is often produced through the echolocation of sound or other focused rays of energy that record the distance between the material touched by the signal, and its return to the recording apparatus. In this haptic mode, non-lens-based photography and machine vision is a way of seeing in the dark.

With the assistance of a GIS engineer John Flower and animator Lily Fang, I modeled the volcano in 3D software using data from the radar topography contour maps of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano from the National Land Survey in Iceland at a rough resolution of 100 meters. The synthetic model of the volcano is shaded with abstract gradients. I drifted through its computed landscape with a virtual camera to frame the prismatic, sequential vistas. An encompassing view of the volcano is never depicted—like how traumatic memory never entirely coheres. Dilations of tone darken and lighten between the spare, imperfect dimensional descriptions that narrate fractured timescales of geological metamorphosis and landscapes of human violence, holding space for affective resonance.

These low-resolution, computed topographies from remote sensing data reappear throughout the cosmology in several different forms: as animated digital twins of the landscapes where the episodes were filmed; as Vistas of pigment-printed neoprene panels mounted against richly colored, backlit walls; as the sectional brass cast frames for the bling Signal Amulets: wearable video screens emitting transmissions from across the network. An extended media archaeology of remote sensing data and time-based recordings of earthly movements and transformations in sound, image, text, and material are found within the Imaginary Explosions cosmology.