Thinking About Getting Into 3D: A virtual performance by Sam Cannon

Above: “data privacy” by stockcatalog licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Apr 13, 2021 Top 10 Picks

Paloma

3 years ago

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

Virtual Performance on Instagram [04/05/21 – 04/10/21]

Resulting figures on SuperRare [4/10/21]

Curator’s note by Alex Czetwertynski

At first glance, Sam Cannon’s latest project seems to be a commentary on the female figure, the contrast between real and idealized, a reckoning between physical flesh and digital skin. It certainly is that, and Sam is no stranger to developing poetic narratives that bite away at the cliché’s around the “perfect” female figure, often making herself subject and object, observer and observed. But there are more layers to Thinking About Getting Into 3D, layers that relate directly to our last year in isolation, and the recent crypto frenzy around “digital” art pieces that seem to come straight out of YouTube 3d software tutorials.

As artists struggled to make ends meet during the last 12 months, Sam would hear friends tell her that they were seriously considering “getting into 3d”, the final frontier of worldmaking. But as they probably soon discovered, 3d is hard, and using prebuilt assets, like ready-made, pre-posed female figures, makes things easier. The result of this is a certain uniformity, a repetition of similar forms, and an entrenchment of the figure designed to follow golden ratio type proportions. As we started seeing more and more of these silhouettes (previously relegated to attention economy worker’s Instagram accounts) in the last few weeks, even when our screen-ridden eyes did their best to avoid the NFT focus grab, we started realizing that the distinction between anything genuine and carbon copies was going to be harder to make, as everything is now a copy or a reference to something else.

Sam’s position articulates itself around this loopy concept. We start with a 3d model from a widely used 3d package, Sam then slowly becomes this figure, but without any digital surgery, re-introducing the real into the digital. What good will it do? We can only hope that it will open her audience’s eyes to the interlocked phenomena of digital ideals and digital copy machines, and help those who are “thinking of getting into 3d” to diversify their gaze, and their output.