CLAIRE HENTSCHKER

Metronom: Claire Hentschker is the third artist invited to participate in Digital Deviation, the 2021 edition of the Digital Video Wall project. After Blurring Contour (2021) by Helen Anna Flanagan and Orb (2016) by Baron Lanteigne, you present Ghostcoaster Reconstruction. What is your Digital Deviation?

Claire Hentschker: I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens to digital artifacts from before a disaster. Do these media objects become artifacts for history? Painful reminders of the past? Roadmaps for how to rebuild? Digital Detritus?

M: Can you tell us about Ghostcoaster, the video work that will be screened until June 15th on METRONOM’s video wall?

CH: Ghostcoaster Reconstruction takes you onto a digitally reconstructed roller coaster that was destroyed in a storm in 2012. The 3D model in the video is recreated entirely from youtube videos shot on the coaster and uploaded to youtube prior to its destruction.
 In 2012 there was a hurricane in my hometown in New Jersey and a beloved roller coaster was thrown off the boardwalk and into the sea. The absurd tragedy caught the attention of the news and for days I saw images of this roller coaster sitting helplessly in the water. Finally after the storm had passed construction crews began to remove the roller coaster piece by piece with cranes, and the community came out to watch. The coaster was not particularly good or fancy, but it was beloved enough that prior to its destruction, multiple people took videos of themselves riding it and uploaded these videos to youtube. Before the hurricane, there was nothing particularly notable about these videos from the perspective of the roller coaster, until they became the last documentation of what it was like to have this experience.
I used a process called photogrammetry to take the individual frames from the youtube videos of the coaster pre hurricane, and create a 3d digital model. I was also able to extract the camera positions relative to the model, so I could see how the camera was moving in space when the initial video was recorded.
All of these pieces came together to create a digital video perspective of riding a roller coaster that doesn’t exist anymore, built from videos people took before they knew it would be destroyed. There are missing parts, awkward lumps and the constant reminder that this is a simulacrum and can never replace the real experience. It’s just a detailed shape of what is missing.

M: As a digital artist, you use experimental imaging technologies, like 3D scanning and photogrammetry, to elaborate sets of found data (images, video, physical objects) into immersive representations of bygone and imaginary spaces.How do you perceive these two dimensions, the past and the unreal, and where does technology stand in between?Are the categories of virtual and physical conceived and perceived as in opposition, both in your practice and in the contemporary world?

CH: hmmm. I think I do consider the virtual and the physical to traditionally be in opposition to one another. Now more than ever I notice a real envy and power struggle between the two categories. Entities with power or that take up space in the virtual world seem to long for validation from the physical world, while those that are rooted more in the physical world seem alienated and drained by a virtual one.
I think the really good and inspiring digital art that I’ve encountered defies this dynamic and uses tools for measuring or making in the physical world towards digital ends (or vice versa). In my own practice I try to learn from these examples and build digital works that point out the absurdity and unexpected beauty that can arise from using and misusing physical tools in virtual spaces. A camera is meant to be used to photograph things in the physical world, but what happens if you build a virtual camera and bring it into virtual spaces like a video game, or youtube? Or what if you just apply the logic of “real world” photography to virtual spaces: you can do wonderful things like shoot landscape photography from the comfort of your bedroom!
As for the way technology stands between the “past” and the “unreal”- I think a lot about the fire at Notre-Dame. Right after it happened, the internet seemed determined to use technology to rebuild the cathedral back to how it once was. I saw many articles that referenced the extensive documentation that existed of the space, and the fact that it had already been meticulously 3D modeled for a video game. As if this could somehow turn back time or “solve” a disaster that had already occured. This is a recurring trope in technology not isolated to 3d reconstruction. People want to bring back the dead with holograms, animate faces from 100 years ago with machine learning, or even capture the joy of attending a concert by recording video. But trying to extract something physical from something that has passed on to the virtual realm after the fact, like a one of a kind cathedral or a concert experience, is a painful awakening to the fact that those media objects become a part of the past as well. Virtual worlds are not exempt from time and while artifacts may be more accessible and malleable stored virtually, they will still age and will only ever show you what once was.

M: One of your latest and most articulated projects, Merch Mulch  (2017) is a many-sided and immersive project, with a strongly sculptural setting. This requires specific skills beside the creative process, could you give us an insight on the practice related to virtually immersive artworks?

CH: Sure! In that work I am using a process called photogrammetry to create the 3D models of the malls. Photogrammetry is a technique for measuring depth from a series of images, and special software that does photogrammetry is frequently used to create 3D models of artifacts for archaeology or video game assets that need to look extremely realistic. The benefit of photogrammetry over traditional modeling is that you begin by taking hundreds of close up images of the object in the real world and those images are then used by the software for reconstruction.
In this piece I decided to misuse this very technical software, and rather than shoot images specifically for reconstruction I broke found youtube videos down into frames and ran those through the software. As long as there was enough overlapping detail from one frame to another, I was able to estimate where parts of each frame existed in three dimensional space. This allowed me to create the 3D models.
Part of the photogrammetry process returns an estimation of where the original camera (and subsequently the person filming it) was moving through the now reconstructed space. I used this information to send a virtual 360 camera back through the model of the space, on the same path as the person who shot the original footage.
The result is an immersive video that allows you to look around inside a reconstruction of a space built from a regular video. The blank areas in the video are the parts that were never seen on camera in the original footage, now forever lost to time as these malls were demolished shortly after the videos were taken.

M: @ntschk IG feed sprinkles with your Bedazzles series. At first glance, it seems something completely different from your main line of research, far away from shiny and cutest creations. Are you playing within the social network or developing a practice for purpose? What is your relationship with social media? Are you interested in them as both creative opportunities and archive tools?

CH: I think I am still trying to figure it out! I was initially really drawn to the absurdity and intricacy of hand glueing 2mm rhinestones onto bags of chips until it was completely covered (and color matched!) The worthless part of the snack, the garbage, was now imbued with value and something that could be kept forever. I also genuinely enjoyed gifting these objects to friends. But as time went on and they gained an unexpected social media following specifically on tiktok, I’ve found myself reflecting much more on the role of social media in the documentation and romanization of covitable objects and personas. I’m not sure how the version of me that makes those objects fits back into my digital art practice, but I am excited to see where it goes. It has also thrown me deeper into the next generation’s culture of social media in a way that is fascinating to me.
Hmm now that I think about it, compared to my digital work the bedazzling has an inverse relationship to the virtual and physical. These physical objects are gaining traction in a virtual space, while my digital practice usually finds its foothold in physical spaces, like your wonderful gallery! I think I would like to continue to play and push that relationship.

M: We are curious about your education and if and how it informed your practice? Are there any professional experiences that left a particular mark on you and your art?

CH: I had the privilege of studying under Golan Levin at Carnegie Mellon University who is a wonderful artist, educator, and person. His teaching had an immense impact on me and I met tons of amazing artists while spending time in the studio he runs called “the Studio for Creative Inquiry.” It served as an interdisciplinary hub of students, faculty and visiting artists who all had extensive cutting edge technical knowledge of computers and made the active choice to apply that towards an art practice. It was really inspiring to be around as a student, especially in a school that otherwise heavily pushed students towards tech industry jobs. It also served as a fantastic reminder that what one applies their skills towards is always an active choice, and not something to take lightly.

M: As a digital artist, you sometimes turn to traditional features in art history as a starting point for your research. We are thinking about for example your 3D experiments in generating interactive depth images from 19th century Anna Atkins cyanotype prints. How this interest of yours originates and how did you conceive this project?

CH: I think my love of art history comes from the tension between technology and the past that I was referencing before. In the case of that project, I was doing some reading about how facebook generates depth maps for images in order to render 3d representations in the browser. The way they do this is by uploading two images, one of a colored photo we are used to seeing in our feed, and one of a corresponding black and white image that we don’t see that serves as a depth map. Depth is stored in the second image through color, so facebook knows to push parts of the image with lighter pixels towards you in 3d space, and parts of the image with darker pixels away from you.
It made me think of cyanotypes because they function similarly- Any object you place between the sun and the photo paper will get captured on the page. The parts farther away from the paper are darker and the parts closer to the image are lighter because less light was able to hit the page.
I realized I could convert cyanotypes to depth images and then upload the same picture twice and get an interactive 3d version of it. It definitely goes back to my desire to be able to reach back in time and pick up an artifact from the past and manipulate it with contemporary technology in a way that actually does add more information to the artifact. Unfortunately this is rarely the case but, like I said earlier, the struggle of that desire is the catalyst for a lot for my work.

M: What are your next projects and collaborations?

CH: I just finished teaching my first class yesterday so the thing I am looking forward to the most is a good night sleep. But after that I am working with a few different archives in institutions to try and use their artifacts for more poetic and less practical purposes.

Claire Hentschker describes herself as an artist who spends a lot of time online but is currently based in New York. She is concerned with documenting and creating nostalgia, detritus, and artifacts from digital culture.
She uses experimental imaging technologies, such as photogrammetry and 3D scanning, to transform sets of found data into immersive representations of bygone places and imaginary spaces.
Claire’s work has earned recognition from artists such as Björk, and been internationally exhibited at venues including MUTEK, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Currents New Media Festival, NEoN Digital Arts Festival, the Peabody-Essex Museum, and others. It is featured in the permanent collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur.

©the artist & METRONOM 2021

09/08/2021