On the inside of the maze, the models connect.

On the outside, they are in a constant battle not to be fixed by their closest binary cliche. 

Inside the maze, they are still safe. 

The models attach to the lineage of open technology and become 3D creatures.

Like the cyborg, the 3D creature links to every creature that has ever existed.

A 3D creature embodies a unstable network of desires.

Our camera is allowed to pass through the surface and view the inside of the 3D model.

Maybe one could expect darkness because no light reflects in a solid mass? 

However, the models are mostly hollow spaces.

The inverse geometry causes an instant of disorientation.

First, to lose oneself without a point of reference.

 Then to find a space that connects each 3D model. 

When the initial nausea has subsided, the models take us in new directions.

The visual fly-through forms a maze and the 3D models weave into each other.

The taxonomy gravitates towards a heteronormative gaze and falls into a binary narrative.

By highlighting the expressed stereotype, the models have a better chance of getting across in the vast amount of content.

 'Spacegirl' is not filed under people.

When a 3D model has been selected, it takes a short time to load.

You can spin the model in the 3D space and look at it from any angle.

The revolving camera awakes a desire for more.

All of the models are categorized: Animals and Pets, Characters and Creatures, People, Weapons and Military.

A search box helps users orient themselves among a massive number of 3D models, and also lists with staff picks and user collections. 

This video uses 3D models from Sketchfab.com. 

SketchFab is an open online marketplace for 3D models, and anyone can publish there.

The site hosts more than three million 3D models and claims to be the largest of its kind in the online realm.

Spending two minutes with each model would take eleven years.

Like most online media, the content is incalculable. 

 Everything you have time to perceive is a mere fraction. 

In here, we can break away from outside stereotypes.

In a common space for queer reorientation.

Radical Inside

3D creatures of the world unite!

As we sort, what we see with our visual memory.

We are caught up in the same surreal cross-section of realism and its realization as the 3D models.

Between 2D and 3D, excess and waste, speed and quality.

The general capacity of the models is feedback blocks for our vision.

A reorientation takes place where the surface of pop culture meets the depth of new technology.

As we follow the 3D models, anthropomorphic opportunity grows around us.

It is a reorientation that embodies the surreal and queer quality of technology.

It is a world filled with revolutionary opportunities.

We call from the depths of these surfaces.

 - 3D creatures of the world wide web unite!

- You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Back to top: Video

Acknowledgments

Visual content has been fundamental to this project. For the 3D models not licensed under creative commons, I requested permission to use models via social media. Additional models were under the creative commons license. I am grateful to have been granted permission to use all of these models for this artistic research project.

The models are in the order they appear in the video:

* Japanese Temple by galaxxxy. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/6RyU9)

* ZZ Gundam - Haman Karn Artist by Nestaeric. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/6UryI)

* Discovery In Pink by vermilionwlad. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/PwBN)

* Latex Knight by Shadeocai. (https://skfb.ly/6zQBK)

* Firy by borisbess. (https://skfb.ly/ZxnH)

* Octavia Diva (T-pose) by lukinu. (https://skfb.ly/698uF)

* Space Girl by Miki Bencz. (https://skfb.ly/6pZAv)

* Bowsette by Magnaomega. (https://skfb.ly/6BYKx)

* Angel sleep by walker77. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/6vFEX)

* Entoma T-pose unrigged by GHPurple. (CC Attribution-NonCommercial - https://skfb.ly/6zE7E)

* Black Cat Wm by xada. (CC Attribution - https://sketchfab.com/xada/ *)

* Sci-fi female by Leti, Gameloft. (https://skfb.ly/nji3g2e0)

* Annisa Nude by Radisty. (https://skfb.ly/6uX7U)

* Fanart Felicia Darkstalkers by Magnaomeg. (https://skfb.ly/6GIwn)

* Lady Ketsueki by ravenousq. (https://skfb.ly/69ZWM)

* Baby Shark by nataliedesign. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/6zXrq)

* Japanese girl by DARKKOVA. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/Dv8R)

* Pika_Girl by graylancer. (CC Attribution - https://skfb.ly/6CwoE)

* DreamWord SexyGirl nvwang by woniumanmanpa (CC Attribution - https://sketchfab.com/woniumanmanpa/ *)

Thank you all for sharing!

I would also like to thank the brilliant Tero Parviainen for the code that generated the drone sound for the audio track; Laura Beloff, whose engagement in the peer-review process and help developing the work were excellent and who was always by my side; Katarina Grönfors, who made helpful suggestions for the text; and Justina Bartoli for language editing.

Finally, thank you to the members of VIS – the Nordic Journal for Artistic Research committee for putting together this issue, the editor of the issues Trond Lossius, and editorial project manager Heidi Paatere Möller.

Thank you all for making this exposition possible.

The ready-made

Anyone in front of a connected web browser can explore the potential. The animation is a Ready-made, as it shows something that anyone with a modern web browser can recreate. The modern web browser, which is growing increasingly powerful, is the context of the artwork and one example of a 3D platform.

The accessibility of free and cheap software facilitates the use of the continually produced 3D content as a base material; some artists who do this are Nikita Diakur, Theo Triantafyllidis, Jeron Braxton, Ed Atkins, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Jon Rafman. With low polygon animations, these artists feed on and challenge the limits of the possibilities of 3D worlds and tools by reinventing the use of the software.

It is a context in which 3D visual algorithms are continually evolving. I am particularly interested in the steadily slanted product that forms between old and new technologies; the development is an intriguing battle between 2D and 3D, excess and waste, speed and quality. The visual effect is present when we look at the surface of any 3D object. The rendered surface of the model is the product of an ongoing history of development. Here, I follow in the argument that ‎Alan Warburton presented in the visual essay "Spectacle, Speculation, Spam" (2006). 3D software updates itself in the background while we use it. At the same time, there is a constant devaluation of the context of 3D images as more realistic simulations appear – that’s why 3D from earlier decades looks cheap to us. Hito Steyerl argues for "the poor image", and the commercial studio wants to escape it. 

I believe that contemporary identity is formed in the cross-section of development where pop culture (segmented memories of technology) and new technology meet. New technology defines what kind of identity we can imagine.

As I speculatively formulate it in the video:

As we sort what we see with our visual memory - we are caught up in the same surreal cross-section of realism and its realization as the 3D models. Between 2D and 3D, excess and waste, speed and quality, the models' general capacity is feedback blocks for our vision. A reorientation takes place where the surface of pop culture meets the depth of new technology.

Or as Katherine Hayles puts it in the prologue to her book How We Became Posthuman:

As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman.

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, University of Chicago Press, 1999 p. xiv.

The cyborg in a struggle with the closest binary cliché

A character that embodies this cross-section and is also a popular 3D theme is the cyborg. The cyborg takes form in the borderland between homo sapiens, animals, and technology. Donna Haraway writes about cyborgs and, more recently, about creatures. More than anything, the cyborg can make us question the essence of humanity, becoming a way to understand ourselves through the agencies of being something else and by making kin.

Although the work has taken a shape, it still holds a lot of potential ambiguity. The battle here is between two forces of visual understanding - an unstable network of desire in a constant struggle with the closest binary cliché. When it comes to Sketchfab, clichés form around the market logic, which often asks us to subscribe to a heteronormative gaze. But inside the maze, we are still safe.

As for humans, I assume that the power of the 3D models resides in their constitution. I guess the 3D models get their agency from their common material connectedness and technical foundation and not just in how they differ, not only how they can be distinguished as products or individual subjects; that is why I see WebGL technology – the algorithms for light and shapes – as a shared opportunity, and why I believe it to be essential to translate these products, things, animals, machines, and bodies into landscapes or sequences for us to experience.

Becoming-wolf

Inside the maze, the models connect. As they are part of the lineage of open technology, they become 3D creatures. A maze forms in the animation as the 3D models weave into each other. Instead of separated objects, the 3D models can fulfill a desire for a shared space for reorientation. - Like the cyborg, the 3D creature link to every creature that has ever existed. The common space, in this case, is topological, inside looking inside, a hole in which a connected rhizome becomes more visible. Instead of objects, it is a map of interconnected possibilities. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write about rhizomes and the wolf as a hole. The passage below can illustrate a change in perspective, not only escaping the taxonomy of the website but also showing how a new spirit is found inside the rhizomatic creature. It is not only an escape from a rigid structure but an awakening of the hole, the reverse geometry. It is the becoming of technology as spirit. The hole is reverse geometry.

Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming- inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To become wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but entangled lines. A hole is no more negative than a wolf. Castration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has no understanding of multiplicities as formations of the unconscious. A wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of molecular multiplicities. It is not even sufficient to say that intense and moving particles pass through holes; a hole is just as much a particle as what passes through it. Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.

               Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. 

London: Continuum. 2004, p. 36.

Like the wolf pack, the 3d models in my world belong together and comprise a strangely formed assemblage of colors and shapes floating alongside pop culture. They are multiplicities within pop. As becoming-wolf, I want the 3d models to move and locate themselves at the periphery of the crowd, not leaving it, becoming it by stretching it, finding lines of flight. Leveraging room for others to explore, deform, merge and stretch. Like in hacking, expanding the use of the system for queer enhancement. To put it in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari: how can the molar lines, structures that underpin the status quo, be expanded by molecular activity, the use of the system?

3D creatures of the world wide web unite!

The world of the animation is slanting, oblique, sidelong, crooked, skewed, askew. It opens up to a powerful possibility that connects us with the 3D models and, if we like, our own bodily, rhizomatic, queer, surreal, Harawaian, Kristivian, psychedelic, spiritual desires and futures. These desires move the gaze around the next corner and drive us through the 3D maze of excess and waste. 

My hope is that the work will reveal these flexible connections between the 3D models. Humans develop visual culture and technological infrastructure in the blending of 2D and 3D; on the horizon, a cyborg creature emerges. With the work, I want to celebrate the future of this unknown creature – a queer cross-section between us and them.

The shift away from the model as an object and clichés reveals a characteristic landscape of surreal beauty. The juxtaposition of more abstract 3D forms and textures is the basis for understanding the work as a liberating force. Hito Steyerl points out that, writing about the surrealists, Walter Benjamin emphasizes the liberating power within things – “the slumbering collective from the dream-filled sleep of capitalist production”. Steyerl continues:

Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged. While this opinion borders on magical thought, according to which things are invested with supernatural powers, it is also a classical materialist take. Because the commodity, too, is understood not as a simple object, but a condensation of social forces. 

Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me.” e-Flux Journal 15, 2010, p. 5.

I end the animation with a classical materialist take - with reference to The Communist Manifesto and with the hope that the 3D models could help us start a revolution. As we follow the 3D models, anthropomorphic opportunity grows around us. The material conditions that produce and maintain them must be changed in order to change the heteronormative values that inform the outside of the models.

It is a reorientation that embodies the surreal and queer quality of technology.

This world is filled with revolutionary opportunities.

We call from the depths of these surfaces.

- 3D Models of the World Wide Web unite!

- You have nothing to lose but your chains!

3.1 The Visual Argument

In my project Radical Inside, I use the ready-made 3D models from Sketchfab.com to make the animation. Through the animation, I want to visually argue for the relational properties of the 3D models as a common space for reorientation. By turning away from the exterior models, I believe a definite reorientation away from selection, and visual clichés established itself.

A striking feature in these 3D scenes are the shaded surfaces that consist of material and underlying meshes. These features include their constitution and relationship, which also involves the shaders - how the surface should react as an agent in the context of scene lighting. In the animation, the technology and algorithms for light, shapes, shadows, and textures appear more like a shared space, and the products, things, animals, machines, and bodies translate into a landscape, a topology, for us to experience. Each model holds a strong universal quality, emphasized by the inside. This space points to the common possibility that can take any form, from metal, plastic, skin, leather, or fur, or anything that can be imagined by the software-existence.

The animation is a visual material fly-through where textures of clothing, skin, leather, and metal surfaces sequence in a maze of inverse geometry. In my mind, the agency of 3D models and their digital materiality break away from stereotypes and form a common space for queer reorientation. They reconnect to their elemental materiality, founded in the ambiguous and disoriented nature as a visual existence. Apart from how the 3D models distinguish as products, I can imagine a connected maze forming a shared space for a reorientation that can reveal the fundamentally surreal and queer quality of technology.

 "While ‘queer’ draws its politics and affective force from the history of nonnormative, gay, lesbian and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Indeed, it was developed as a primarily public stance and a political attitude from which cultural authority could be disputed."

David J. Getsy, "Introduction // Queer Intolerability and its Attachments."  Queer. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2016.

As David J. Getsy writes, queer stretches beyond sexual orientation as a tool to question taxonomies. Technology, as a force of change, is inherently queer. However, the queer as a tendency is hidden, lurking in the shadows of our gadgets and screens – one that I want to bring to the forefront. New technologies enable new kinds of flows. As these grow and meet other rigid structures already present in the world, they will flow into these powers. They encounter deeply rooted laws, monopolies, stereotypes, and norms that will discipline the disruptive potential. A queer multiverse of alternative assemblage is luring. Queer Technology is about to step out into an Harawaian universe (from Haraway), as the technology takes an increasingly anamorphic and augmented role as we find kinship with animals and machines.

Reorientation and Nausea. 

Connected to the web, you can reenact the exploration of the inside - hopefully not without a feeling of pleasant nausea. I state that the 3D space has evolved from a marketplace of normative logic to a space of queer rendering. The main argument for the queerness created by the shift in perspective is that the underlying and visual model is algorithmic and therefore procedural, and it continues and can morph. The maze of bodies reveals glitches of layers of material as well as a bodily deconstruction. This forms a base for the imagination into anthropomorphic body-hacking.

Queer technology is a reorientation starts and depends on geometrical disorientation. In Topologies of Power (2016), John Allan describes how stretched, folded, or twisted space can be a way to transcend power. Here, I would like to suggest the development of broken and morphing computer visions as computer voguing – as a procedural queer culture. New spatialities generate new metaphors and must become queer to break down categories.

"Phenomenology, after all, is full of queer moments, moments of disorientation, which involve not only “the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our own contingency and the horror with which it fills us.” After all, if consciousness is intentional, then we are not only directed toward objects, but those objects also take us in a certain direction."

Sara Ahmed, "Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 4, 2006, p. 3.

Ahmed's viewpoint that objects take us in a direction underlines the multiplicity of the actor-network perspective (ANT). In line with this, both technology and humans are nodes in a network of interrelated agencies. More importantly, it is reminiscent of how Julia Kristeva’s writings on the abject - as something in which we must be submerged in order to understand. Our bodies are gradually becoming what we see.

2.1 Shifting perspective

As the 3D models lack simulation of collision (collision boxes), our camera is allowed to pass through the surface and view the inside. Maybe one could expect darkness because no light reflects in a solid mass? As it turns out however the models are mostly hollow, with double-sided textures. What appears is geometry reversed, a moment of disorientation, a breakdown of the categories, with no clear point of reference: more space than a model.

The inside offers a new perspective on the quality of the object, and new features emerge. After exploring the inside of numerous 3D models, the universal qualities begin to interweave. When the initial nausea has subsided, the models take us in new directions.

As I put it in the video: First, to lose oneself without a point of reference. Then to find a space that connects each 3D model.

The visual fly-through forms a maze.

I find the inner beauty of the 3D models striking. As the inside unfolds, it reveals the structure, the building blocks, a mixed surface where 2D and 3D meet. I find the cave-like labyrinth to be a surrealist color and sculptural assemblage informed by distorted desires. The abject surfaces arouse a pleasurably uncanny feeling – a promise to merge into new anthropomorphic beings. The direct experience of that inner beauty makes me envision the site as one single body made up of all the 3D models connected, forming a shared inside that is turned away from the normative market logic of the website.

1.1 The SketchFab Website

Content > Time

This work uses 3D models from Sketchfab.com. SketchFab is an open online marketplace for 3D models, and anyone can publish there. The site hosts more than three million 3D models and claims to be the largest of its kind in the online realm. Spending two minutes with each model would take eleven years. Like most online media, the content is unfathomable. For comparison, YouTube servers process 300 minutes of video content for our consumption every minute. Everything you have time to perceive is a mere fraction.

Exploring the website

April 2019: there are two main content links at Sketchfab.com. One section is a marketplace, reached via the link BUY 3D MODELS, and the other is for exploration, accessed through the link EXPLORE. At the marketplace, the focus is on market logic: the goal is to sell 3D models, and every model has a price tag. The explore section is for showcasing and sharing. Under these links, all of the models are categorized: Animals and Pets, Characters and Creatures, People, Weapons and Military. 

A search box helps users orient themselves among a massive number of 3D models, and also lists with staff picks and user collections. A detailed view of each model can be accessed by clicking from any of the lists.

3 The Visual Argument

Next: 1, The Sketchfab website

2, Shifting perspective

Back to top: Text

1.2 Detailed view

2.2 Making the Animation

* Spectacle, Speculation, Spam (2006)

3.2 Further visual context

3 000 000 models = 11 years

3 The Visual Argument

 https://vimeo.com/194963450 

2.3 First Animation Draft

2.4 Animation Tutorial

 https://youtu.be/RBGn7y353Jc 

 https://youtu.be/vKomcm34q2Y 

Radical Inside: Tutorial part 3

var iframe = document.getElementById( 'api-frame' );
model = allModels.models.spacegirl;
var uid = model.id;
var version = '1.5.1';
var client = new Sketchfab( iframe );
var currentEventList = model.events
var modelIndexCount = 0;
var currentModel = '';
var posIndex = 0;
var isClicking = false;
var cooldown = false;
var isLoading = false;
var iframeName = '';
var playanimation = true;
var clickview = true;

function success( callback ) {
      api = callback;
      api.load();
      api.start();
      isClicking = false;
      cooldown = false;
      api.addEventListener( 'viewerready', function() {
           if (clickview) {
             api.addEventListener(
                 'click',
                 function(info) {
                   // get the camera position by clicking on the far left of screen
                   if (info.position2D[0] < 100) {
                     promtCameraPosition(api);
                   }
                 }
             );
           }
           if (playanimation) {
             animationEvent();
           }
      });
  };

function animationEvent() {
  if(posIndex > currentEventList.length-1) {
    posIndex=1;
  }
  var currentAnimation =  setTimeout(function() {
    animationEvent();
  }, currentEventList[posIndex].duration * 300);
  setCamera();
}

function setCamera() {
  if (isLoading == false) {
    api.setCameraLookAt(
      currentEventList[posIndex].position,
      currentEventList[posIndex].target,
      currentEventList[posIndex].duration
    );
    if (cooldown == false) {
      posIndex++;
      cooldown = true;
    } else {
      setTimeout(function(){
        cooldown = false;
      }, 1000);
    }
  }
}

function promtCameraPosition() {
  api.getCameraLookAt(function(err, camera) {
    var pos_log = '"position": ['+ camera.position +'],' + "\n";
    var pos_log = pos_log + '"target": ['+ camera.target + '],'
    prompt("Copy to clipboard: Ctrl+C, Enter", pos_log);
  });
}

client.init(uid, {
    success: success,
    internal: 1,
    ui_infos: 0,
    ui_controls: 1,
    ui_vr: 0,
    ui_help: 0,
    ui_setttings: 0,
    ui_stop: 0,
    watermark: 0,
    fullscreen: 1,
    preload: 1
});