Incompleteness is often regarded as failure, but I position it as an ever-expanding potential for change. My work is an act of refusal, I reject the prescribed use of the technologies I engage. I accrete digital techniques around my experience of gender non-conforming womanhood, combining coding, 3D modeling, and game design in ways which defy traditional measures of success. Being visibly queer can be burdensome and exhausting, and we live in an era when social media and surveillance culture are constantly evolving to more intimately capture the details of our private selves. Engaging digital practices allows me to subvert the feeling of exposure left in the wake of increased visibility of queerness in a world still unsafe for queer people.
“An Angel In 3/4 View” features 3D scans of my dirty laundry, unwashed dishes, and queer body. The website consists of a home page populated by images linking to 3D spaces that allow audiences to explore what’s shown in each image. Commercial 3D scanning focuses on precisely capturing its subject, however I use this technique to distort the real. I break the accuracy of 3D scans by forcing skewed perspectives, ripped models, and inverted geometries.
My 3D scans retain enough realism to note that they are taken from life, but they are glitchy, and uncanny. I animate each of these glitched 3D scans to cyclically disintegrate and reintegrate. The animations allow me to see the image of myself dissolve until blissfully unrecognizable. Watching my body melt away allows me to shed my bodily embarrassment. Breaking methods of technologically enabled hyper-realism is a form of radical self-love. The continual dissolution of the 3D scans imitates the always changing atmosphere of my life; new trash, new laundry, new dishes, new stretch marks, new moles, new wrinkles. Distorting my digitally recorded image empowers me to continually re-imagine myself in the virtual spaces that prefer to recognize my face exclusively in high definition.