3D as artistic practice
Threedimensionality concerns more the mode of production than of presentation or of perception, which comes often only in two dimensions. As an artistic position, 3D has not much of significance, but as a mode of creating worlds, meaning and subversion of both, it may has. Characters and environment, lighting and materials consisting only as a virtual set of points and relations in space, digitally interpreted and calculated, but arranged by hand. Most of what we experience on the net is 2D, but the hyperreal manifests itself more and more through games, 3D models, VR, Mixed Reality and Augmented Reality approaches. The hyperreal of Baudrillard is found in the practice of manipulating and inventing shapes and relations in 3D space – the chase for “realistic” seems futile:
TODAY ABSTRACTION IS NO LONGER THAT OF THE MAP, THE DOUBLE, THE MIRROR, OR THE CONCEPT. SIMULATION IS NO LONGER THAT OF A TERRITORY, A REFERENTIAL BEING, OR A SUBSTANCE. IT IS THE GENERATION BY MODELS OF A REAL WITHOUT ORIGIN OR REALITY: A HYPERREAL.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD (1980)
HECK’s highly discursive position of affirmative critique “in between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, is constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries” – is like this quote an appropriation (here a description of Hito Steyerls work). HECK is not ashamed to admit that he is doing work embedded in a changing network of ideas and memories. Every purpose of or description may be seen as a repetition, a work of theft, of copyleft.
The artist´s reflections on the social roles of art and museums, experimenting with media forms of presentation, and critically examining the use of artificial intelligence – and virtual 3D environments. Not only his short-films but also his animations and game projects consist of poetic narration supported by a unique blend of pop cultural images, documentary footage and computer-animated sequences, criticising and reenacting the proliferation of digital images and their large-scale implications, also in artistic production. Not all of this must be true – not all a blunt lie. It could be a simple invitation to regard a circling animation of objects as more than a whimsical joke, manifesting something erratic in 3D. Why shall we end in a caleidoscope of Feyerabend´s “Anything goes”?
Are there, aren´t there limits, is art still fine, is it just a territory we explore again and again while it evolves and devolves? Isn´t the territory limitless? Do we care? Have we taste? Do you?
Shall our earth be limitless, our growth and our exploitation of our kin, animal & plantlife? Or can we find happiness in self-restraint, and is this artistically interesting. Maybe yes.