ORIGINS + JOURNEYS

A juried online exhibition organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community

Topography of the Unseen

Volker Kuchelmeister

Work Description

Topography of the Unseen offers a unique perspective on the Parramatta Girls Home, a former state-controlled child welfare institution situated adjacent to the convict-era Parramatta Female Factory in Sydney, Australia. Up until the early 1980s, ‘children at risk’ were held and subjected to unwarranted punishment and abuse. The film offers a reconstructed reality in its unique representational format. Photographic veracity is partly suspended in an uncertain and dissolute world of recollections. With one trend in CGI to generate ever more realistic depictions, this project takes a deliberate step back and makes use of a primitive reconstructed reality, the point cloud representation. It is to achieve a unique look, which in my view, is compatible with how human memory operates. It is mutable, reconstructed and fragmented.

Video Documentation

Artist Bio
Volker Kuchelmeister is a media artist, researcher and digital media specialist. He is expert in place representation and has worked extensively with cinematography, interactive systems, immersive visualisation and mediation in the performing arts while exploring and exploding the boundaries of the cinematic image. He has founded and directed three leading media-art research labs (ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe Germany - Multimedia Studio, UNSW iCinema Centre Media Lab and the UNSW National Institute for Experimental Art - Immersive Media Lab) and his interactive installations and experimental video projects are exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals around the world.