On my last visit to Rye I revisited the location of some white stones, seemingly randomly collected together. I discussed this with other students at a crit and the consensus was that they were gathered by humans. The idea of it being a kind of bird stone nest was also proferred – this is not totally impossible; more normally penguins make this type of nest, valuing particular stones and often stealing from one another. There are no penguins at Rye Harbour although terns also make stone nests from time to time. These are, however, deliberately designed to blend in to rocky terrain so it seems unlikely they would “highlight” the nest site in this way.
There is another, perhaps more interesting, theory – that the photographer noticed that the stones stood out from a particular angle and then emphasised this by lining them up with the old stone lighthouse. In other words, they were not so much a collection of stones but some stones that looked like a collection from the correct viewpoint. This is just conjecture, but they were still there when I revisited several months later, and (I noticed) much more noticeable from a certain angle than from other points. Much of the shingle close to the sea (i.e. the beach, although for some of its length the shingle extends inland beyond what would normally be classified as shore), by contrast, had been resculpted – either by the action of waves or by human activity moving the shingle around between Rye and Pett to counter literal drift.
I have been considering the possibility of using the stones in a work. My original photograph reminded me of the ephemeral works of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and I felt that I could make something in the same spirit that emphasised the constructed nature of the landscape. I collected (and will replace) a number of the white stones and have been photographing, 3D scanning and 3D printing them. In other words I have been manufacturing my own landscape and learning about 3D representation as I go along.
To do this I set up the stone on my tripod on a plinth improvised from a bolt and the small rubber bands that hold spring onions together – the latter forming a kind of flexible washer that helped keep the bolt in place under the tripod plate. I took 60-80 images of each stone, using my DSLR on a tripod from 4 different heights and rotating the stone and, importantly, turning it upside down or onto different faces. I learnt that this last adjustment will allow the masking function of the 3D object processor used by POLYCAM to exclude my makeshift plinth. This was not totally foolproof and needed some adjustment – each file was taken as a fine quality JPEG and the whole set batch processed in Affinity Photo to increase sharpness and contrast and crop to mostly the stone with only inconsistent elements of the support. The cropping helped the mask function identify my intended object.
I found the digitally generated 3D videos quite aesthetic – almost planetary or monolithic, reminding me to some extend of the giant stone sites erected thousands of years ago across Britain that I have been reading about in Nicholas Crane’s The Making of the British Landscape. The video at the head of this blog entry is made by combining nine separate videos scans in Da Vinci Resolve.
POLYCAM also produces STL mesh files that can be loaded into ULTIMAKER CURA’s open source 3D printing engine to be sliced into GCODE for 3D printing. This allowed me to reprint each stone – I decided to use red for this. Red is an interesting colour for this – it is the colour of the roof of the iconic hut at Rye, as well as the only colour (apart from black and white) used in my 3D camera design. It also occurs rarely in nature, and so confers meanings of danger. Yet despite all this, it is not recognised by animals such as dogs, raising the question of whether it really exists – this sits rather neatly within my exploration of the reality of nature. My plan is to take these red stones back to the site at Rye and rephotograph them, producing a second image to contrast with the original white stones.
The red stones give me addition objects (artefacts from a simulacral landscape?) which could be used as part of an exhibition, perhaps alongside models of the red hut and my 3D printed camera.
I made a mock up of how my red stones image might work – I had originally planned to work in black and white, in a similar fashion to Long and Fulton. However, on consideration and after feedback from the crit session, it may be better to work in colour:
My first b&w photo on my 3D printed 4×5 camera was a version of the stones image top left. When I got the results back from the lab, it was interesting to realise that my mock up of the red stones in b&w was in some ways similar to the negative of the white stones image (at least in the effect of the stones flipping from white to black).
Each red stone take between 1.5 and 2.5 hours to print, and is perhaps 3 x3x3 = 27 cubic centimetres on average (0.000027 cubic metres). Incidentally the shingle landscape at Rye is over 3km long, beween about 10m and 300m wide, and conservatively at least 0.2m deep. This would suggest a volume of very approximately 93,000 cubic metres, or nearly 3.5 billion stones. So it would take me 800,000 years to recreate the beach at Rye – a process that must have been achieved “naturally” in at least 12,000 years since in 10,000 BC Britain was connected to mainland Europe.
Following up on my use of an AI generative engine for my last assignment, I also experimented briefly with getting DALL-E 2 to manufacture digital stones for me – I was interested in whether it could learn to generate stones similar to the ones I had collected. However, again it appears to scrape images from the internet rather than any serious analysis of my content. It does have a function that will expand an image, and the result was not awful, but still not very much like my white stones. Maybe I need to find a different type of AI engine (perhaps one that can generate copies from visual examples more effectively, rather than requiring text prompts), or maybe the technology is less advanced than the media hype has led me to believe:
I have also discovered that POLYCAM has an AR (augmented reality) function that will allow me to digitally place my 3D models within a film of the landscape. I have played with this briefly in my garden, monumentalising one of the 3D mapped pebbles from Rye Harbour by expanding it massively within the frame. The footage can only be taken in portrait mode and does not seem to use the iphone on board stabilisation – some motion can be useful to convey reality to the viewer virtually “walking” around the object – handheld footage in films such as the Bourne series has been used very successfully although generally in more extreme situations where it carries the stress – but this is a fine judgement. I tried using my post-processing software to stabilise it but this caused the stone to jitter – I presume because it is augmented on to the rest of the image. The original was also rather saturated, so I took out some of this, and used a little noise reduction to deal with the wind. If I was to use this for anything presentable, I would need to take it on a gimbal with a proper microphone fitted with a dead cat wind cover.
The result is obviously a bit unrealistic, which may in part be because it is a moving image which makes it harder to present convincingly. It could be possible to take a still from the footage and blend the stone in, although the question then becomes why not just do this more effectively in a photo post-processor such as Affinity.
Nevertheless there could be something here which relates the work to the monumental landscapes of the New Stone Age in Britain, which I have been reading about recently in The Making of the British Landscape. Coincidentally in the Sunday Times this weekend (21.5.2023) I find the image below – a New Stone Age Monolith from 3100BC. This image also appears a bit super-saturated to me – strangely more like my original footage than the toned down one! My original impression of my video may have been influenced by its augmented reality nature, or the one in the paper may just have been filtered rather too eagerly to give it some pop.
The technique could also be used to place my model of the Red Hut in the landscape (or even replace the original).
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Alamy (s.d.) The Standing Stones of Stenness. At: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/4f1ce970-f4d3-11ed-86fc-830c67557acd?shareToken=922e2027223471a134b88e9b614473b0 (Accessed 21.5.2023)
Level 3.1 Learning Log 
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