Baking Normal

24.01.2020

With works by Juliet Aaltonen and Olle Stjerne

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In digital rendering work-flows, the baking of normal maps is a memory-saving process of taking high-resolution polygonal meshes, sculpted to resemble real world objects down to the finest detail and projecting these meshes onto a low-resolution version, a process known as ’baking’. Last year Olle Stjerne held public drift surveys, psychogeographical walks, mapping out areas of the city that are problematic and undesirable. He is currently exploring ways of distilling the places into objects, imbuing them with history. Apparently the objects themselves have their own ideas, and transcend into other realms. Juliet Aaltonen explores the traces of her surroundings through a process of ‘chemical rubbing’, or printing of environment and surface, onto various materials. A series of prints developed on a floor can be a way of mapping out the topography, introducing us to imprints from the creases and folds, gaps, grid of a metal surface, floor crevices and more. Juliet creates a recondite, flat topography of the three-dimensional surfaces whilst transferring them. The borders between technology and magic are pushed back and forth in our mind on a daily basis. The amount of work that goes into rendering the virtual realities of our tv-shows and movies and the UI:s of our apps are conveniently ignored or taken for granted. Indeed, great care is taken into making us forget that there is work behind the screen. If we don’t know how technology works, how is it any different from magic? We as viewers are forced to recompense our lack of knowledge with our own imagination. The reaction is there, whether or not we know how it works. It is in the fluctuation between magic and technology, knowing and ignoring we bounce around, until we finally choose to see. ‘Show me the meaning of complacency, how to relax.’