TO SOFTEN THE SURFACE

An exploration of 3D museum artefact scans as soft images.

'…the idea of the image as software, and the idea of a soft image – a flexible, adaptable, or pliable image (which, as a result, is also a protean, multiform, and multiplatform image). In porn, soft as opposed to hard means that sex is not shown full on, but merely evoked, or enrobed by a narrative. Likewise, the softimage is an image that evokes or eludes (or even hides) in place of showing.' 

(Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie discussing their use of the term softimage in ‘The Status of the Image in Digital Culture’ 2016)

Hoelzl and Marie describe the softimage as an image-software as opposed to the photographic because of the way it is able to recalculate itself in real time as we traverse its plane. Although there is a three-dimensionality, we are only able to navigate the surface of the object, to see it as an image plane or interface. We can enter, yet we are separate, removed by the screen.

The following soft images are replicas of the 3D scan, which themselves are replicas of the original object. The scans have gone through multiple processes, from object to scan, to screen capture to print, to photograph to screen.

The printed objects collide back with the material realm through experiments in surface treatment, themselves becoming fragments or remnants of the screen, claiming back the qualities of the original artefact.

TO SOFTEN THE SURFACE

An exploration of 3D museum artefact scans as soft images.

'…the idea of the image as software, and the idea of a soft image – a flexible, adaptable, or pliable image (which, as a result, is also a protean, multiform, and multiplatform image). In porn, soft as opposed to hard means that sex is not shown full on, but merely evoked, or enrobed by a narrative. Likewise, the softimage is an image that evokes or eludes (or even hides) in place of showing.' 

(Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie discussing their use of the term softimage in ‘The Status of the Image in Digital Culture’ 2016)

Hoelzl and Marie describe the softimage as an image-software as opposed to the photographic because of the way it is able to recalculate itself in real time as we traverse its plane. Although there is a three-dimensionality, we are only able to navigate the surface of the object, to see it as an image plane or interface. We can enter, yet we are separate, removed by the screen.

The following soft images are replicas of the 3D scan, which themselves are replicas of the original object. The scans have gone through multiple processes, from object to scan, to screen capture to print, to photograph to screen.

The printed objects collide back with the material realm through experiments in surface treatment, themselves becoming fragments or remnants of the screen, claiming back the qualities of the original artefact.

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