The Creator

In The Creator scene, I reprise the manilla artifact originally featured in "Congo Square", juxtaposed with a self-portrait made using photogrammetry. This method of digital asset creation can be broadly defined as: “a three-dimensional measurement technique that uses photography to derive the location of common features between multiple photographs in order to three- dimensionally reconstruct a digital model of an object.” Beyond this theoretical depiction, the material conditions of the technique embody Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, as the soon-to-be digitized object must be rendered inert and then photographed from every conceivable angle. In this scenario, the relationship between the supposed creator of the digital model and the object being represented mirrors that of the colonizer and the colonized body, a kind of techno-scientific incarnation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic.