Transformation as Translation

research project

conducted by Hito Steyerl

The project deals with the transition of 2 dimensional imagery into 3D images. What transformations happen along the way, especially in relation to documentary representation? What do these transformations tell us about a changing reality? The project will take video and 3D representations of the site of a presumed warcrime in Turkish Kurdistan as an example, a site where 41 disappeared and missing people are supposed to have been buried. What appears, when it´s 2D representions are transformed into 3D? Do we get any closer to reality or to finding out what happened?

What appears in the shift from 2D to 2,5 and 3D is in fact less reality, or a reconstructed truth but a fractional space that hovers between dimensions. In essence what is revealed are the limits of 2D representation; it´s blind spots and white shadows. In the shift from 2 to 3D we might not see new evidence, but WE SEE WHAT WE CANNOT SEE in form of a lack, a missing chunk of space. What becomes manifest is the missing information as a 3 dimensional body in space. It is not the 41 bodies of the missing, but the missing itself as a body with a spatial extension. What becomes manifest in the white shadows of 3D are the holes and caverns of a social and political space that is hollowed out in it´s substance and in which people are able to disappear.

The project will consist of an essay and a power point documentation of the testing process. It argues that the translation from 2 to 3D is a transformation, that brings the limits of a specific representational paradigm into focus.

Schedule:
Writing of essay: 1.3-1.6 2012. For the essay see: Ripping reality. Blind Spots and Wrecked Data in 3D
Visual tests (kinnect vs motion tracking): 1.6.-1.10.2012.
Documentation of visual research process: 1.10-1.12.2012. For the documentation see 3d-Body of the Image



http://eipcp.net/projects/heterolingual/files/artproject
Transformation as Translation