 Ready? Yes. Hello everybody. Super happy to be here with you today. And so let's get started. I'm Philippe Obergotier. I'm professor at École des Arts Visuelles et Mediatiques in Quebec, Canada, and I teach Blender every year, which is great. And I'm also the Associate Director of Artistic Research of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music, Media and Technology. And today I am also with Mathieu. Hi. Okay. That's it. Good. Let's go. Let's jump in. So you took me by surprise. Yeah, so today we're going to talk about this kind of project that we start together, the Presbyopic Camera and the Myopic Object, quite a challenging title. The presentation is also including Tanya Saint-Pierre because I will present some of our dual work in that direction. So let's jump in. This is actually the version of Blender when I started to use Blender. So I think it was around 2009, probably version 2.something. So it's funny because it means it's nearly 14 years, but it's just to make things clear. We don't define ourselves like animators or real 3D artists. We're really more coming from the world of visual and digital art. So it's kind of a little bit different, I would say. So the meaning of this is that you have to know that we work in a very specific context in the visual and digital arts, contemporary arts also. So typically the place where we are presenting the outputs of our work is mostly art space, gallery space, artist's run center, things like that. So we have no pretension at all. Let's play with that a little bit. So one of the characteristics of what we do is we use 3D and Blender always in relation with the material and physical world. So what we are doing is typically installations, print, 2D or 3D, objects, video, and even mocaps. And one of the driving questions that we all have is relation between art, science, and technology and all the cultural, social, and even historical aspect of all these technology. And we will play with you today with these kind of topics. So this is a plan for today. Very quickly we will just present some past work, first Mathieu and then our duo. And then I will introduce the project, the background, the question and research hypothesis. And we provide a super short conclusion. So without further ado, it's your turn. Thank you. So my name is Mathieu Latulip and I'm a multidisciplinary artist from Montreal. And I do modernization, but I do also like real modernization like in, it's a real gallery and it's a real mock-up. So my goal is more like to build world. So it could be in digital modernization or in physical modernization. And I like to do installation that I put both of them. And my goal is to question like the way we inhabit the world and the way we live together. So, and I like to mix them like to create world. So also I like to question the archviz, like the architectural visualization. More in a reflexive way. Like I like to think about the thing that sometimes it's a bit cliche or called a representation. So I like to put sunset, a bunch of birds. I don't know if you ever notice, but in archviz you have a lot of birds, maybe more than in the real life. And it's sometimes when you keep your eyes on it, you realize that because it's like, you know, like always the same model. And I want to say thank you to be here and also like because I'm really happy to, that I learned Blender because I think we have to realize that few years before, like I had to go really to, I was planning to go to a dessert to take a picture, to have to make a dessert. But now I can stay in my living room and do like dunes, every stuff that you can find in a dessert and I don't stay, I don't move. I can do bunch of them. I still put some cream, but it's just like for the coconut smell of it. And speaking of dessert, I started to work more like recently with Blender. I'm not a long time user, as you can see. And I work, I want to do bunch of fake, fictional wall. And I also started a website and I see it more as a piece of art than a portfolio website. And so I started to build like kind of crazy wall, sometimes serious, sometimes more funny one. And yeah, I started with a space that is a data city or smart city. And it collapsed because like hackers act the commitization. So it put like really like really frozen in some space, really cold and super warm in other place. And with the QR code, it's really funny because you can do also like a 3D model. And when you watch your screen, you have like another model with your phone. And we don't have time to try this one. And of course, like I like to all the perspective you can have like to when you want to build a world like the 3D, it's just like I show like how you can also build world without maybe not doing animation. And yeah, it's just more a zoom in. It's not crazy. I skill of modernization. But even I think with me journey and everything, I think I will go maybe less photorealistic, like to really maybe just print it super just the line and do watercolor. But I bought watercolor and never opened the tube. So and so yeah, so I see like a big horizon of thing that you can do with Blender and it's really crazy awesome software. And also I think for the website I'm building, I like I'm happy to be here because I think I will join also other artists that doing kind of crazy world or fictional world. And I started to work also like with virtual tour. But I do like the 360 panoramic that you just upload. And it's really crazy way to easy super easy. You have a bunch of website that you can use to do that. And you can put iras like picture. So yeah, so just some image like Maram sock is because like they was like. And now I'm a PhD at you come. And I work with Philip mobile. And it's just like funny slide to make the transition. Yeah, it's the transition slide. But it's a slide that kind of introduce the thing will present at the end. It's about the point of view because one of the really funny thing. And it was related to a talk this morning is that we still have the point of view in a computer, which is kind of a total historical construct. So let's jump in for a quick presentation of our duo work some six some of the selected work. First one is something is happening. Nothing very special in terms of 3D. It's just an empty space. But we were interested in a notion called as very similitude. If you didn't hear a lot about that, I suggest you can have a look. It's roughly this idea that because of CGI, we tend to do hyper details like beyond realism somehow. This was made like many years ago. Very basic print on paper 30,000 pixel by 15,000. But if you take a close look as a people in the museum, you will see Oh, the white wall is actually modeled in terms of the, by the way, it's 100% render. We actually modelized kind of just the painting texture. Nothing special, nothing complicated, but it was displayed with a high resolution. And it was, of course, higher resolution than typical video screen. So it's an exhibition. And we were playing with this idea of using new technology CGI to represent former image technology studio lamps in a studio in a kind of a romantic perspective of older technology going in the dust. And we were modeling dust and tiny, tiny details on the printing, but very super basic modeling. Another project in this direction we also made is called phantom production. It's a video diptych. You can see it as an outdoor installation. Roughly, we were interested in how cameraman's movement can act as marker of realism in CGI. We had a very nice also presentation here this morning about that. Very nice example. So we have been doing our camera tracking, but the result is actually a video diptych. What I mean by that is really that on the left, this is a presentation in a festival, you had the real shooting, super basic empty space abandoned. And on the right, you would have the CGI and the two were just in sync in terms of camera movement. That's it. Nothing more than that. Just some quick, sorry for the low res. These are kind of bad JPEG wrong here. But anyway, give you an idea of kind of the aesthetics. Very simple image because we wanted to focus on the movement as marker of realism. The most recent, not the most, but nearly the most recent thing we have been doing together with Tania is Intertip, which is a work about 3D printing. But we wanted to think about 3D print in the history of print. So it's an exhibition again with 3D prints and prints. And here you see that on the left, the four little paper, they were actually fake simulated press engraving all done with Bender, of course. And we had real 3D print also, of course. And this is an example of a fake engraving plate in 3D print. I know I should have been able to cut the little thing, but it was to actually leave it obvious as a 3D print. And so if you get a close up, you would see the groove from the metal plate. And maybe have you seen that the plate is a little bit curved? Because in the past, when you had to press with metal plates, after a while, they would be bending and then they have to throw it away. So all the piece in this installation was including historical reference, hidden somehow of the glitch related to the history of print. And so in the end, we had this kind of fake print with the embossing caused by the plate. And also if you would zoom in, I don't know if you see it here, but we were simulating the embossing 3D, of course, of the line getting in the paper. And actually these things are printed like that size, like super small. They really like a real engraved thing. And the light was coming from the top, so we kind of included that in the simulation. Once again, 100% blender. And last week, we have been integrating our most recent piece. And this is a picture, not CGI. So it's Grand Théâtre de Québec, which is a big theater in Quebec City, Canada. And we started with paper collage by Tania Saint-Pierre. She has been working like for years based on the interior design magazine. So it's all part of interior design, but combined with natural element, because she noticed that in the 80s, these magazines, we are including like super strong natural element, like big fireplace, big bath, and so on. And we kind of translated this idea of collage into a 3D creation. It's a video installation of 75 minutes, all based on the paper collage. Sometimes they are included, but sometimes they are kind of reenacted in 3D. So just some example here. And these are cell phone picture from last week. So it was presented. It's a four level high video projection. So we're super excited. It will be there for six months if you pass through Québec with a soundtrack also, which was modular synthesis controlled by the color level of the video as a post treatment. So if you want to know more, we have of course a website. So now I think I'm pretty good. So about the project that we're starting together, it's kind of all based on that. And it's something we want to share with you maybe to have some feedback or ideas about the background. I will start with something coming from science and technology studies, which is called culture embedded in technology, which is if you don't know about, I think we should all read about that. It's the idea that whatever you do, if you're a developer, you live in a given culture. So your code will be influenced by your own culture. So whatever you do, cars, motorcycles, if you create technology, part of your own culture will be manifest through your choice. So it's very important for us to start with that. Another concept coming from science and technology studies is social construction of technology. Any technology of users, then you have an emerging behavior, social or individual or whatever. Sometimes it's not planned in the technology called development. It appears after a few examples include the iPod battle. I think it was not part of the plan for Apple. Any things like that. So there's plenty of these things. So the thing today that we want to share and it's the starting point of the project is that blender is another technology and it's not neutral. Let's play with that. So another thing that we input for the project is the idea that all CGI is, of course, heavily relying on mathematics, which is actually a copy somehow of the history of painting, optics, geometry. This is all embedded in the code. Every time I press render, I'm so excited to kind of reenact, you know, it's like 400 years, 400, maybe 500, maybe 500 years of painting in history that we convocate. And this is just an example from the book. Of course, projective geometry being one of the most, you know, obvious example. Another super strong influence for this project is Hubert Damich who wrote about the origin of perspective. But he shows actually a plural history of perspective. Lots of many experiments, lots of mathematical theorems all combined together, step by step very slowly toward the end of the perspective. So it's something, one of the things from the history of perspective which drive the project that I will slowly introduce is the Brunelles experiment. Maybe you're familiar with that. It's the idea of the painter was having a painting with a little hole so he could place a mirror, take a look at the architecture without the mirror and then put the mirror, compare with the painting and do his painting to fit the architecture. And then you have all the emergence of vanishing point perspective and so on. And if you take a look at the history of perspective, there's plenty of other example. And for instance here we have Durard which is drawing a loot using a string, a little door, opening and closing. So lots of technical experiment and mathematics and concept that are all embedded in our software which I find very exciting. Anyway, if you're interested, you can go like forever in perspective history to see how much it is based on that. So what about that? So our starting hypothesis then is that there's at least two elements of history of painting embedded in any computer, sorry, CGI software like Blender, of course projective geometry and ray tracing for all the shadings. So what about that? What do we do with that? Let's think about this and our project. The question is based on media ramization. I don't know if you know that expression. It's this idea that often a new technology will emulate part of the former one. I think that the photo realism is the best example to make a real CGI image. It should look like old photographic Polaroid. You know all about that. So this is media ramization. So CGI somehow recreated camera and painting and the funny thing is why? You know it's a computer. We could do a funny nonexisting camera. So that's the goal with the project. We want to explore new point of view but we don't necessarily want to go abstract because we could do processing or whatever. No, we still want to use CGI to do other point of view. So the goal is to create images that would capture a non-human or non-regional or non-camera-based point of view. I will call it point of view for now just so it's shorter but you understand that we don't know yet. The question then would be how other things would perceive light and create image based on that and art of course. So a few hypotheses how to do that. We think about baking because it's one of the way to compute light not at the point of view. Maybe fake baking, camera with baking, something. Shading acts, maybe lens hacking. I've been surprised in one of my course a student made a very funny experiment with Blender. He wanted to know if it was able to simulate light pipes, optic fiber and he made a huge amount of 10,000 optic fiber to bend a shadow and it actually worked straight. So this is kind of playing with optics maybe and maybe accessing more render hacks and tweaks. I dream of being able to take Blender or anything else. Say, oh, please make the bend, the rays, just curve a little bit, just for fun. These kinds of tweaks. So we have some preliminary tests to share with you today and we're kind of here today to have any feedback or ideas and share about that. So one of the inspiration was this image from a project I shown earlier. It's just a baking of shadows on an object but it's this idea of the object being a myopic, for instance, and few other examples. It's mostly principle example because it's really a project that we start now. A bunch of objects over a plane and if you do the baking of on the plane you will have this image but this is the inverted one by the way. And then you say, you know, it's a photogram. I don't know if you know photogram. You take a photo paper, you put objects on it, you expose light, and then you have this kind of image. But you see that touching objects are in focus and anything everywhere is out of focus. So maybe playing with that is one avenue. One of the other possible avenues is to really go into shader and geometry node and use and play and tweak spiders from retracing or even develop custom code, which is one possibility. And in the end, something that we have to decide is how we will present this and we're going back to your image matter. So I think that the piece will be something like on the left you have an image so you understand the scene and then using hot spot maybe via an navigation you could see the light as perceived by an object or something. So this is kind of a joke image but it illustrates the concept. So the objective in the end, if I have to make it short, we want to do image inspired from the history of perspective and finally I think we'll go for Ukraine perspective. What I mean by that is imagine if at Brunelles time the mirror and the painter, a different experiment setup would have been existing and then a change in history would have been happened. So I think we will imagine fake perspective device that would have been existing in the past and play a little bit with that to create image. But we want to conceptually transfer this to kind of a fictitious CGI paradigm. I think that's the plan roughly. So we should work on that like for the next two years by the way. So super quick conclusion. I think we're on time. Yes. So CGI, I hope that everybody leave today with this thing in your mind. It's a medium with a cultural significance and also with meaning. So it's not neutral. So the future for the project is really just to create a bunch of images, objects probably may even installation. We're like super open about this idea of light perception by something different than a point in space, something different from our eyes. Open question for now. We don't know exactly what will be modeling. That's kind of a big problem. And maybe in a sci-fi world like we will be here but doing a really different conference. We know. We don't know yet. But one thing we know is that it will be probably a reference to hysterical complement. So the other goal also of course is to do this only and only with Blender. And that's kind of that's it. Thank you so much. Very great event. Thank you everybody for the teams and everything.