Beyond Her Mesh

To use the application, hold one of the paintings in the installation in the viewfinder of your mobile device for several seconds. One of the images is attached. In 3D modeling, the term ‘mesh’ is given to the collection of vertices, edges, and faces that define the shape of a 3D object in a digital environment. When we scan something in 3D, the output is a mesh, and, for instance, the Face ID on apple devices like the ones used in the exhibition works by using the camera to create a 3D mesh of the user’s face to compare with an earlier saved mesh to assess whether this is the person who has permission to access information on the device. Virtual worlds like those in video games are defined by meshes - human meshes, architectural meshes, botanical and zoological meshes - built into simulation systems that control the way that their surfaces react to light and atmospheric conditions. For a machine, our world could be seen as a collection of meshes, like a sculpture park. The behaviour of these meshes can be observed and used as data to create more meshes. In 3D artificial intelligence frameworks, AI models trained on large datasets of existing 3D meshes, often sourced from video games, can learn and replicate exaggerated female features (e.g., large breasts and buttocks, small waists) due to biased training data, leading to stereotypical and unrealistic mesh generation. Are women in virtual environments pre-destined to be untruths and partial truths, much the way they have existed in physical history? What is the substance behind the mesh that makes us more than a collection of points in space? A portrait is an attempt to capture this essence, but this human process of perception and reproduction is also prone to bias, ignorance and hidden motives. Beyond Her Mesh presents a series of found portraits of women: statues and carvings of anonymous and recognizable historical women which were first 3D scanned, then edited in a 3D software to replace the stone and wood of their origin with skin. They were given new augmented bodies with skeletons allowing them to move, each one given her own dance. These new Frankenstein’s hybrids were then in turn virtually photographed and painted by the artist and subsequently introduced into a simulation system that exists behind the surface of those paintings, accessible via augmented reality. Each figure in the installation represents a multilayered portrait forged from a dialogue between surface and imagination.