Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

In recent weeks, I’ve had the chance to show Export to World to a range of audiences, first on stage with Linda at an excellent reboot 10 in Copenhagen, for which we revisited our findings and added a few new ones. More recently at the design studios of Sony and Nokia in Los Angeles. A few ideas that came from this:

The truly interesting (and unexpected) moment for this project was when we put the objects outside to take photos for the documentation. On the pictures, the objects give a bizarre, almost photoshop-like impression, which we attributed to the fact that they had been modeled after a real object. Now they somewhat visually collided with their origins and produce the mentioned effect. In fact it was so strong that some didn’t believe they were physical objects at all when captured on a photo.

Unintentionally, we applied a similar technique as the artist and photographer Thomas Demand, who takes photos (mostly with historic background but somewhat lesser-known), recreates the scene in paper and takes a photo again which becomes his artwork. However, there is a significantly different twist to our result, which is that it also reflects on the way that virtual environments like games or any kind of simulation imitates physical reality, in this case to the point where some even feel uncomfortable.

Julian Bleecker added a whole new perspective to that when he remarked that these photos are somewhere uncannily “between heaven and hell” for him, and that especially the compression artifacts on some of the textures, which make it thinkable that one day even what we consider to be real might become subject of the paradigms of the digital in such ways that effects like this might appear. Another interesting idea from Julian and his colleagues at Nokia was that of our project as a magnifying glass for data, since the models we extracted were initially impossibly small.

More along the lines of the collision of real and virtual, in terms of aesthetics, were some of our ideas for our talk. It somewhat appears as if there is an increasingly lively interchange between the realms of the simulated and the simulation which has a noticeable effect on how objects are designed or portrayed. A great example would be BMW’s recent M8 Hommage Car, which by a friend on first glance was mistaken for an exported object from Second Life. Another example is the BBC’s Igglepiggle show, which for me was in fact one of the first media products to give me a hard time in figuring out whether it was computer animated footage or live action video. It turned out to be the latter, but resulted in five minutes of uncertainty and was only confirmed by the Daily Mail.

Inversely, there’s games which portray reality at an unprecedented scale, both technically and in terms of their financial success versus the film industry. I recently saw GTA4 for the first time and, especially currently living in an American urban environment, was very much amazed by the richness of the texture in the simulation. For me, the same applied to the recent Batman-movie The Dark Knight, in which the effects on Aaron Eckhart’s Two-Face were done in such a way, that it in a sense leapfrogged realism and almost came closer to the original comic character while still being a cinematographic representation.

Visiting a friend’s place that has before been heavily featured on Flickr is no different from visiting a set where a familiar movie was shot. The similarities between social media and narrative media, as we tried to sketch with this project in 2005 are becoming increasingly visible and are merging into one stream.

Everyone’s an actor now, creating a great number of what Jyri Engeström calls Social Objects on the way. Maybe even TV shows like Big Brother were an early sign of that, in the way that they turned the private (although it is a scripted private) into a form of entertainment. Consequentially, according to psychiatrists in Montréal, there’s now what they call the Truman Show Disorder, which has people believe they actually are actors in a script.