Since I was young, I have been fascinated by cinema's ability to transport me to other worlds—to far away lands, landscapes of fire, apocolyptic futures, and virtual microcosms. I believed these places were real and invented the characters' backstories and imagined the terrain of the unseen places. Part of the magic of the movies is that not everything is shown, described, or depicted—allowing the viewer to participate in expanding on the narratives, the characters, and the sets.
The Topography Series explores these cinematic, fantasy worlds by constructing virtual planetoids from their visual surfaces. The videos are created by loading individual frames in sequence into a custom written program. Each pixel is analyzed for brightness and color and is translated into a z-coordinate—transforming areas of light and shadow into topographical features. These ‘cinespheres’ are put into rotation and hang in an empty black void—like the planetary bodies of some strange solar system. Teaming with movement, energy and life, the spinning spheres present alternating patterns of abstract, symmetrical sculptures and often recognizable and iconic, cinematic images. The filmic image is both accentuated and obliterated by the transformation into three dimensions.