Intersections - Nguyen Dang Binh

Brit Bunkley
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sheep Jet Head is a series of interrelated artworks created with 3D
software that incorporates a displacement map of an iconic jet plane
on a 3D model of a sheep within a rural landscape. In these three
works, an element of the same 3D files is output in different media
in this case as a 2D print, a 3D print (lOM rapid prototype), and a
component of a video composited with actual footage. For me, the
same digital entities (manifested in different forms) provide interesting
examples of the ontological questions:
What constitutes the identity of an object? Can one give an account
of what it means to say that a physical object exists? What are an
object’s properties or relations and how are they related to the
object itself?
Such questions have been the subject of inquiry by artists for
decades (most notably Magritte and Kosuth) and now have taken
on a new significance with the relatively recent introduction of technologically
sophisticated digital illusions.
This series of artworks use flora and fauna commonly found in
New Zealand and modifies them digitally in order to implicitly
infer psychological, environmental, and social dislocations. My
environment has clearly played an important role in the creation
of this work. I moved from New York City in 1995, to rural New
Zealand (where I live surrounded by sheep paddocks).
Electronic Art and Animation Catalog Art Gallery Artworks
CONTACT
Sheep Jet Head
40-inch square, an 8-inch x 10-inch x 10-foot sculpture, and a 20-inch flat lCD video screen
Rapid prototype sculpture, 2D lambda print, 3D animation
Brit Bunkley
Quay School of the Arts
57 Campbell Street
Wanganui, New Zealand
brit@ihug.co.nz
www.britbunkley.com
With an affinity to staged photography, these current images
attempt through ambiguity of scale, material, reflection, and
perspective to blur the line between images of virtual objects
and actual objects in a believable but slightly skewed setting
that is both convincing and unsettling.
TECHNICAl STATEMENT
Sheep Jet Head is a 2D lambda print created from a 3D file. The
3D file was modeled with 3D Studio software utilizing a displacement
map of a jet plane icon on a model of a sheep composited on a
photograph of rural New Zealand. The “displacement map modifier”
modifies a dense wire frame mesh with a bitmap/raster image.
The light areas of a 2D image “push” the digital mesh while the
dark areas “pull” the mesh, resulting in an embossed-like relief; the
software pushes as if the vector mesh were a taut rubber sheet.
In the video, the same file is animated (composited on a different
background in video). It was edited in Premiere Pro.
The rapid-prototype sculpture was created using the lOM (layeredobject
manufacturing) process, an old rapid-prototyping process
that cuts cross sections of the model on layers of glued papers with
lasers.