RENDERING REALITY, REALITY RENDERING
2019
Haotian Zhang
Thesis project at the Cooper Union, advised by Michael Young, Anna Bokov, and Austin Wade Smith
This project seeks to expose the incompatibility between the analogue and the rendered, reality and its strenuous mimicry. Despite an advanced realistic machine, rendering fails to achieve the infinite complexity of reality. Time-lapse photography renders a high-resolution room illuminated with low-res lights, therefore becoming an abstraction of reality, and intentional removal of information. It digitizes the analogue process of lighting, and retains the discrepancies between reality and its digitization. The discrepancies, the inevitable inaccuracies, constitutes the aesthetic qualities. To render in reality is to regard rendering not as a virtual simulation removed from reality, but a process entangled with reality, and discrepancies not as flaws but valuable traces of time and material.
Exhibited at Aesthetics of Prosthetics, Pratt Institute;
What is Contemporary, the Cooper Union;
At Once / U Tren Oka, STIFF Film Festival