LiDAR data, Three.js frontend, SQLite database.
There is much appeal to be found in the virtual. For storytellers and world-builders, it offers a degree of power and control limited only by technical capability—laws of physics need not apply here, entropy tastefully implemented rather than pervasive and all-corrupting. Yet in exchange for this power is a cost steeper than apparent: an alienation from organic process, decay, and transmutation, and from the sort of delicious emergence only possible through situated, sensate encounters with our more-than-human kin. Save As, a LiDAR-based internet artwork, identifies the unavoidable lossiness in acts of digitizing/datafying the natural world, offering a multistage refraction of a site from my youth: changed in an ecological sense as all natural sites always are, then frozen in time and quantized into a data-object; a simulacrum. Pushing back against the myths of perfection and controllability advanced by digital media, an intervention is introduced to restore to the data a sense of earthly materiality: each time the LiDAR point cloud is loaded in a web browser, 32 points are permanently displaced from their original fidelity, an accumulative effect evoking the wear inherent to playing back physical, analogue media. Countering technocratic visions of a data-driven transcendence, Save As positions itself as a fallible and incomplete representation of a far richer web of relations that extends well beyond the bounds of human-made networks.
