Re-figuring: A 3D modeling workshop - Gray Area Festival Workshop

Re-figuring: A 3D modeling workshop
– Gray Area Festival Workshop

Learn basic photogrammetry and digital sculptural production while you create meaningful work with creative technologies. This is a 3D modeling workshop that teaches not only technical skills, but also examines our relationship to objects, technology, and the material world through a critical lens.

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This workshop is part of the Gray Area Festival 2023: Plural Prototypes and the C/Change Initiative.

Marking Gray Area’s 15th anniversary, this year’s Gray Area Festival highlights in-progress cultural experiments from our Creative Research and Development Labs, Cultural Incubator, and Education programs in collaboration with community and industry partners.

C/Change is a joint initiative by Goethe-Institut San Francisco and Gray Area, exploring ways emerging technologies can shape and support digital cultural exchange.

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Course Logistics

Dates
Sunday October 22, 2023

Location

Gray Area
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco

Time
10am – 1pm

Cost
$10 for a 3hr hands-on workshop

We also offer Diversity Scholarships, find out more and apply here.

Experience level: Beginner

Course Requirements:
No prerequisites or prior knowledge is necessary.

Participants should bring their iPhone 11 (or above), or their iPads to the workshop. If they can, please install the Luma AI app on their iPhones in advance to ensure a seamless scanning experience. We will bring some iPads for those participants who can’t install Luma AI on their devices.

Please bring a small object that is meaningful to you and that you would like to recreate in a digital form.

Course Outline

Introductions
Presentation: the Missing Objects Library and Historical Curiosity Cabinets
Photogrammetry using Luma AI
Basic 3D model viewing, editng, and sharing using Sketchfab
Final reflections on the workshop

Education Goals

This is a 3D model production workshop using photogrammetry, but our goal is to also engender critical thinking about creative technologies. We will approach digital production through the lens of activism and a socially engaged praxis that creates opportunities for conversations about our political and ecological realities.

Technologies

In the workshop, participants will be introduced to the technique of photogrammetry, enabling them to create 3D models of small objects they bring in. They will also learn how to upload these 3D models to platforms like the Missing Objects Library or Sketchfab. Additionally, participants will gain skills in viewing, editing, and sharing the 3D models they scan using Luma AI. However, please note that Luma AI is only accessible to iPhone 11 or above users, and it is not available for Android users.

About the Project

Missing Objects Library

Missing Object Library (MOL) is a curated, web-based repository of handmade 3D objects that are designed with an intersectional, feminist lens. MOL offers an alternative to commercial, status quo storefronts that provide digital assets for game design and special effects. Objects sold in these spaces are typically devoid of provenance, and they continually re-inscribe false notions of neutrality while privileging a white, cis, heteronormative dominance. In contrast, MOL is an open platform with downloadable models that accurately represent the world we inhabit. MOL disrupts historical gatekeeping performed by “neutral” marketplaces by offering 3D modeled objects that span a wide range of identities, abilities, and affinities. In addition to critiquing existing 3D model storefronts, MOL builds community by offering an economic system of reciprocity, where technological representations of things are exchanged to produce meaningful relations and effects

Instructor(s)

Jill Miller

Jill Miller’s artwork uses a wide range of media, from experimental digital technologies to public practices. Miller makes art through a feminist, intersectional lens, and her work uses humor as a strategy for opening up meaningful conversations about challenging subjects. She often uses technology to create comical spectacles that propose impossible solutions to social problems. She is an art professor and member of the executive committee at the Berkeley Center for New Media at UC Berkeley.

Asma Kazmi

Asma Kazmi’s large scale installations blend physical and virtual spaces: drawing on her history as a third-generation émigré, Kazmi’s experimental museums make use of Islamic display devices and strategies to address colonial and indigenous technologies and knowledge, global flows of people and commodities, and interspecies entanglements. Kazmi is a professor in the department of Art Practice and the Berkeley Center for New Media at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kathy Wang

Kathy Wang is a talented designer and creative technologist, specializing in AR/VR and AI to create captivating human-computer interactions. Passionate about feminist technologies, she addresses bias in digital art. She inspires others to explore their potential with these tools, pushing boundaries and fostering a dynamic, diverse, and audacious art community. Through collaboration with other artists and technologists, she continually experiments to create innovative art that embraces the infinite possibilities of emerging technologies.