Media: Copper, Wood, acrylic, projection material, digital video, projector.
‘A Virtual Bathymetric’ premiered at Piksel Festival, Norway, 2016. It is a small and self-contained version of the faux-holo idea originally shown at White Night (Nuit Blanche), Melbourne and QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, as ‘Cartology Apology’. It is an experimental projection sculpture.
Piksel festival is a festival for sustainable digital art that has been produced through open-source software. The video created and shown through this sculpture traced popular shipping routes, particularly in the North Sea, but also globally. In projecting through the sculpture, the line of light seemed to morph into a topography. Original artist statement:
“A Virtual Bathymetric” uses frame-by-frame drawing animated in JavaScript to re-create the tracings of local and global shipping trade routes and sea floor topography. By stylising these routes as abstract imagery, the concepts of mapping and documentation are brought into question and re-imagined. Placed into a 3D copper cube of holographic projection screens, the image multiplies and distorts, creating its own faux topography. “A Virtual Bathymetric” is not your usual room-sized projection mapping onto an object, indeed it is very small. In being so small, it allows the viewer, perhaps even forces, a more intimate connection; a one-on-one interaction with a holographic ocean.