Captives – CG Geological Formations as Life-Size ‘Unfinished’ Sculptures

Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures by Quayola and a contemporary homage to Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”. The project explores tensions and equilibrium between form and matter, man-made objects of perfection and complex, chaotic forms of nature. In this series mathematical functions and processes describe computer-generated geological formations, endlessly evolving and morphing into classical figures resulting into life-size ‘unfinished’ sculptures.

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped, and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it. The best artist has that thought alone which is contained within the marble shell; the sculptor’s hand can only break the spell to free the figures slumbering in the stone. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. Michelangelo (1501)

Prigioni - Michelangelo (1513-1534)
Prigioni – Michelangelo (1513-1534)

The project is comprised of a number of different iterations, tools and processes. Starting off with the building models of existing sculptures using zBrush, running them through custom vvvv softwares, exporting and finally producing the physical sculptures milled by a robot. The installation also includes animated scenes, rendered using custom software and finally edited for the video installation sequenced across 6 hd screens with each having its own audio channel.

For this project Quayola wanted to use software that would produce immediate feedback and have a realtime response. Since traditional 3d packages tend to cripple the flow, Quayola wanted something where he could have a “conversation” with the model, a bit like a sculptor would have with clay or stone. There is an action and an immediate response.

The software is built using VVVV through a series of custom nodes and DX11 shaders, and integrated in the Dedalo framework CAN covered about few weeks back. The core code for handling the geometry is done by Matt Swoboda and Juliet Vuillet, while all the system and rendering is done by Natan Sinigaglia (within the Dedalo framework). The software itself runs on two machines, the first handling a noise engine, presets and control for all parameters, while the second is handling the actual rendering. The noise engine is used to control all the parameters in the software. Each parameter can be mapped on a given output of the noise engine. The engine does not produces textures but directly works with functions that get compiled into a shader.

For centuries, Chinese scholars have contemplated the oddly shaped stones that became known as “scholar’s rocks”. Their shapes might evoke ever-changing associations and their surfaces convey a sense of millennia of exposure to nature. Yet it remains unknown to what extent the “natural” shapes of these stones have been manipulated, an artificiality enhanced by the wood or stone pedestals created for them. Their extraordinary beauty and their enigmatic mysteriousness can be seen as a conceptual model for contemporary art practices working on the complex relationship between the authentic and the manipulated – the figurative and the abstract. — Tommaso Franzolini on Captives (images below)

The volume is based on voxels and excavated with boolean or additive operations. It is meshed with marching cubes, then a series of additional effects are applied on the mesh, like smoothing, tessellation-displacement, mesh-simplifying. A system of metadata in the mesh allows to apply (or not to apply) effects on the figure and/or the volume around it. Finally the render engine is the one of Dedalo. In this case Quayola is using a 3-spot-lights rig with soft shadows and BDRF procedural materials. Almost everything runs on the GPU (nvidia titan) and pretty much realtime (from 30fps to 10fps depending on voxel resolution).

Captives-by-Quayola---voxels

Your animation in a certain way combines both because the surrounding material seems to be liquid, flowing, surging and then to recede, leaving the statue….In both cases, however, we are witnessing an act of transformation: By eliminating or driving back the surrounding material, the statue takes shape and out of something amorphous and unformed that seems to be “natural”, something man-made, artistic emerges. — Henry Keazor in conversation with Quayola

The final sculptures that form part of exhibit were milled with ABB robots with rotary platforms. Due to the complexity in geometry, the robots had about 1.2 million lines of instructions to follow (each line has xyz+rotation info for the robot to approach the surface). Quayola tells CAN, this is an unordinary amount of data for a robot to follow. The robot’s tip is mounted with a special HST spindle with a liquid cooler system, running up to 24000rpm and it has been programmed to change its tools automatically, so to optimise milling time. As the robot had to run 24h, ODICO installed an sms system that will directly connect with their mobile to alert if there is a stop/problem.

Quayola describes the project as only the beginning of a process. The exhibition is organised in the same way, as a document of a process with aim to produce various series of videos and sculptures, exploring different geological simulations as well as different figures. Quayola is about to embark on proper scanning session with a dancer to create a set of new figures, so to be the subject of new pieces. Of course, harder synthetic materials or Carrara marble is always on the table, if the budgets permits.

The project is now on display at the MU | Strijp S Gallery in Eindhoven (Torenallee 40-06).
Sat, Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed: 12 – 6 PM / Thurs and Fri: 12 PM – 9 PM (also during Dutch Design Week)

Project Page | Exhibition Page | Quayola

Co-Production: ELMSLY – MU Gallery
Manufacturing: Odico
Software: Natan Sinigaglia, Matt Swoboda, Julien Vuillet
Sound: David Kamp
Z-Brush: James Hardingham
Assistants: Matteo Zamagni, Aymie Backler

captives-by-quayola-MU_02

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