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.
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.
