An Artificial Welcome Mat is a photographic series of my bedroom. I’m inviting viewers to peer into my personal space, without them knowing exactly what they're looking at in the images. I took 3D captured scans of my bedroom using an app called Polycam on my iphone and then took those 3D files (.OBJ) and ran them through photoshop; this gave my images a cloudy and bubble-like texture. It had been trial and error to figure out what 3D file type I could import into photoshop, and after this success I knew I wanted to explore more alternative digital processes. How can I display a curated profile of my room, without giving away too much data on myself?
Along with the 3D scans, I took a 30 second room tone audio recording and then ran it through Audacity as RAW data to which I was able to export that sound into visual data, a JPEG. These 30 seconds of sound captured the humm of my fan, cars passing by outside, dialogue from the TV show I was watching, but mostly it was just silence. I intentionally did not clean or move things around to stage my room’s appearance as something it was not in the present. I view this project as a time capsule of my bedroom, like it's an embodiment of myself. Unlike how objects in a time capsule are meant to tell a story of who that person was, my images are meant to shelter and protect my story. I feel safe in public when I know I can hide. Open, but guarded; An Artificial Welcome Mat.
