I should say at the head that this post is not really about photography. But before I get a head of myself, it does head in a similar direction… Ok I’m done.

This is my contribution to The Head Project which, in case you didn’t know, is “a work of worldwide collaborative fiction”. Basically you get a head for two weeks, it is yours to do as you please with the only condition that you document your experiences, feed it and post it off to the next person when the two weeks are over.

So the box arrives in York, and for the first time I begin to get a sense of what the project is really about. The container itself, the outer protective shell of the head is clearly well travelled. There are many addresses scrawled over the cardboard with a return to: in Chicago and it arrives bearing documents from the Icelandic post office. Global indeed. I decided my contribution should coincide with where my own head is at…

Science inspiring art is a subject I touched upon in a recent interview conducted for The Student Photography Blog (you see how it all ties in, marvellous). This is the first post in a series where I hope to explore this idea a bit more concretely.

The department where I’m finishing up my thesis has a Cyberware 3030 3D digitizer - which for want of a more succinct term is a laser head scanning thingie. The machine basically produces computer models, of erm, heads, and even won Cyberware an Oscar for it’s use in the films Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. What you end up with looks a little bit like this:

The scan head rotates 360 degrees around the subject measuring the distance to each point on the surface. That is unless that point happens to be dark hair. This is the reason for my shoddy attempt at ladies hairstyling.

As well as range (distance) data the scanner has a camera to record colour information. The result is in fact an ordinary visible light photograph, albeit from a nonstandard mapping function (n.b. the banding is due to the scan head getting in the way of an external lightsource).

I’d probably have a hard time trying to convince a critic that a computer model of a head is art (for one thing it’s not even cut in half!) but this is just a starting point. I intend to use the data as the basis for more creative work, and possibly even make the original files available for other people to use, in a sort of virtual continuation of the project. But first… the pub. To be continued.

MG

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 12:22 am and is filed under Random musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.