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. Each point is driven toward one of two poles—compressed into the binary logic of computation (a process which, less apparently, has already occurred in the moment of digitization). Over time, the work will wholly unravel.
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.
