Cartesian Divide 2

A slot canyon is a liminal space, where you are below the surface and yet still in the sun. Millions of years ago, water and time carved away the soft flesh of the surface, revealing the bones of the earth. This canyon in Escalante Utah has no exit, making any journey into it a loop, starting and ending in the same place. Weather, light, and sound are all experienced differently within, perhaps because time is not the same between the deep stone walls.

A human made the journey to this place and space and used a digital camera to “capture” the canyon over the course of 30 minutes. Several hundred images were created, small flattened windows cut from reality and time, encoded on a piece of silicon as zeros and ones. Reality fragmented into bits of true and false so that a computer can digest it. Months later, these images are decoded to reconstruct the canyon, the photogrammetry process turning flat images into millions of triangles made of points in X, Y, and Z space. But the resulting surface is false, one sided, and lacking any substance.

In these works, various algorithms try to rebuild the slot canyon, bringing light but no understanding. Humankind's attempts to apply Cartesian space onto the world is a sort of violence, cutting everything into grids and cubes. While our homes and spaces are all “snapped to grid,” the unmanufactured world is fuzzy, twisted, and literally reshaped by time and over time. These four videos attempt to understand these conceptual conflicts.

1080x1920 animations. Visuals by Chris Coleman Sound Design by George Cicci 2022