Collective Individualism
What: Technology seminar project
Where: UCLA AUD
Instructor: Yara Feghali
Team: Luis Garcia, Alekya Malladi, Gesthimani Roumpani, Chinmayi Suri
Tech Showcase: Photogrammetry, Videogame Development, Animation
⭐ I also managed this project!
Entourage. Modeling, texturing, animation by Gesthimani Roumpani.
Drawing in the manner of:
Erin K. Wright, Backyard Landscape 03, 2019
Challenging the new normal of our pandemic lifestyle, collective individualism imagines a live-work space that lets us self-isolate and collaborate. Four distinct living rooms, for four distinct owners, within four walls, separated by four mere pieces of furniture.
Part 1: documentation
Using photogrammetry as a documentation tool for our real living rooms, opened up conversations about data dignity, authorship and surveillance. The digital data was put together and combined to produce a re-imagined space from existing objects, destroying the rigid structure and use of these objects as we know them.
Part 2: drawings
Inspired by Erin K. Wright’s isometric paintings, we modeled our collective living room in four corners. This geometric comparison of the photogrammetry data and the 3d modeled elements led us to juxtapose one against the other, encouraging this competition of supposedly identical objects, created with different methods, posing a paradox of "real" and "manufactured" geometries and abstract and realistic textures.
Part 3: game application
In the last part of this project, where we made a Unity app for the user to build their own living room from our objects, there is no power over which piece comes up and at what frequency. This leads to the liberation from the typical four wall restriction that was produced in our drawings, and the gradual abolition of the idea of a replica, via extreme fragmentation.
Collective Individualism poses the dilemma of accuracy between the ambiguous point cloud-generated geometry with its nearly perfect textures on the one hand, and the nearly perfect modeled geometry with its original visualization of color on the other. Which type of geometry constitutes a better copy?