“Cloud-ing”

Maya Alam + Daniele Profeta

Armstrong Gallery | Kent, OH
September 16–October 18, 2019

// “The exhibition CLOUD ~ING leverages the ephemeral bi-products of scanning technologies (point clouds and image making) to explore 3 discarded sites, across 3 basic building materials (stone, wood & metal) with 3 elemental form-making strategies (line, plane & volume). They are developed, accelerating the heterogeneous, often contradictory set of evidences of their context, weaving technology and culture into new classifications of form, suggesting inclusive aesthetics to open up venues of engagement outside of a rigid disciplinary conversation. Standing in as the initial site of investigation in the development of our projects are these digital material worlds. Rather than treating the unfolded textures of a given site as static, objective content, we begin by articulating possible spatial interventions leveraging their pixels as the smallest building block. Engaging with the materiality that each of those pixels originally depicts, these allow for a more flexible relationship with them, rather than mere emulation.Situated between hyperreal photography and gaming aesthetics, these image worlds connect the digital content of the initial scans with their projective design.Engaging with three different materialities, stone / steel and glass, the exhibited models are not intend to operate as direct representations of their respective design, but rather they attempt to renegotiate basic architecture formal strategies (line / plane and volume) in order to articulate spatial interventions for these complex scanned sites.The digitally captured environments of the three sites are imported in the space of the gallery, a copy-paste operation to multiply readings between design interventions. A series of viewing platforms are deployed throughout the gallery, each engaging with different sections of the exhibit.Leveraging immersive imaging technologies of 360° videos, the individual animated clouds begin to intermingle, ceasing to be easily distinguishable and constructing a new environment in the space of the gallery. The viewer, positioned across this landscape, orbiting around can begin to construct novel modes of engagement across physical and digital realms. It is through the medium of the video that the exhibition is stitched together.”

text: A+P Practice

installation team: Aditya Mehta, Zexi Tang, Erick Sanchez, Jonathan Bonezzi, Kyle Troyer, Ryan Lane, Aiden Crossey, Denver Curtis

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