The last time I wrote about this, the problem was that the photographs did not exist.
Twenty six of the thirty two sculptures I had picked out of Dave’s archive survive in exactly one image. One angle, shot years ago, often the only frame anyone ever took. Software that builds a three dimensional model needs to see an object from several sides, so for that first piece I had to ask an image model to imagine the missing views and draw them. It worked. It also meant the model was an interpretation, a convincing account of the sculpture rather than a record of it. I said so at the time and I will keep saying it.
This one is different, and the difference is the whole point of the archive.
The piece
It is a column. A heavy fluted pedestal, the kind that usually holds a bust or a fern in somebody’s front hall, painted a deep oxblood red. On top of it Dave built a city.
That is the only word for it. Hundreds of small turned objects, spools and caps and blocks and beads, packed edge to edge into a dense skyline, and then the whole surface strung over with a web of fine red thread. From across a room it reads as one solid mass. Up close it comes apart into individual streets.
The join is the thing. A pedestal is furniture whose entire job is to be ignored so you look at what sits on it. Dave painted the pedestal the same red as the city and refused to let it disappear. The support and the supported became one object.
Five angles to work from
When I went to build this one, the archive had five separate photographs of it. A straight front elevation. A three quarter view. Two more from the other side. And one taken from directly above, looking down into the city.
They had been filed in five different folders under five different names, because they came off different cameras in different years, so nobody had ever seen them as a set. That is what an archive is actually for. Not storage. Adjacency.
I still used an image model to generate the clean studio views that went into the reconstruction. That part of the process has not changed. What changed is what it had to work from.
With one photograph, an image model is guessing at the back of an object it has never seen. With five real angles, including one looking straight down into the city, it is not guessing. It is redrawing something it can already see from most of the sides that matter. The generated views came back accurate because the archive told them what to be accurate to.
That is the difference between invention and translation, and you can see it in the result. This model is far closer to the object than the first one was.
Turn it yourself
Drag to rotate. Scroll or pinch to zoom.
The part that always fights back
What came back was one hundred and twenty six megabytes and three million triangles. Beautiful, and impossible to open on a phone.
Shrinking it is where Dave’s work resists, and it resists in a way I have now seen twice. The usual approach throws away detail the eye will not miss. On a smooth object that is invisible. On this one the detail IS the work.
My first pass took it down to one megabyte. The file was tiny and the model was ruined. All those separate little objects on top had melted into one lumpy crust, and the flutes on the column had gone soft. It was the shape of the sculpture with the sculpture taken out.
It settled around four and a half megabytes. That keeps the city as a city, the flutes crisp, and the surface colour and roughness intact, and it still opens in a couple of seconds. Below that you are looking at a lump on a stick.
One thing I could not save. The red thread that webs across the top does not survive in any version. It is a fraction of a millimetre thick and photogrammetry has nothing to grip. In the model the city sits bare. Worth knowing before you look, and worth saying out loud rather than hoping nobody notices.
Why this matters more than one model
Every piece that goes through this becomes something new. Not a picture of a sculpture. An object with volume, that you can turn, walk around, look down into, and eventually stand in your own room at actual size through a phone.
Dave has been building a world for fourteen years, one accumulation at a time, and it has only ever existed in his studio and in flat photographs on a wall. These files are the first version of that world you can enter. A column you can walk around. A chair you can look at from behind. The beginning of a set of rooms rather than a set of images.
There are thirty more pieces staged and waiting. This is the second.
