Sergio Monje

These works are made through what I like to call “weird photogrammetry”. This is to me the practice of a kind of photogrammetry (a technique that consists in the production of digital three-dimensional realistic models from multiple flat photographs) that follows an unorthodox methodology, uninvested in the achievement of photographic hyperrealism, and thus deviating in a certain measure from its filiation with photography. Instead, this weird photogrammetry intends to purposefully provoke the apparition of imperfections or “weird artifacts” (which when practicing regular photogrammetry are sought to avoid), through, for example, the selection of subjects normally considered difficult to interpret for photogrammetry software tools, like reflective or translucent surfaces, thin volumes, or non static objects. We take advantage of this “wrong” way to use the software as an unintended feature, to generate shapes, textures and color patches that shun realism and the will to digitally replicate the physical world, but instead embrace the virtual and eerie nature of the objects made with photogrammetry.

The resulting scenes, that evoke unearthly landscapes, are an exercise of dissolution of our sense of scale, decontextualized from a clear human frame of reference: the micro is confused with the macro, the biological with the inert, the solid with the liquid, the physical with the immaterial, the photographic with the pictorial, the familiar with the otherly, the real with the unreal. Software interprets the world in an alien way, a non-human perception that results in uncategorizable forms. A hybrid imagination that produces emergent weird realities that open ways for speculation.