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We often rely on images to understand the world. But can a single image truly tell us what happened? And when we use 3D modeling to respond to an image, are we simply copying what we see, or building something entirely new — something the image never showed?

This was the starting point of my exploration over the semester.

In Positions through Iterating, I began with a single image: a hen laying an egg. I used this image to create 100 visual iterations, using modeling as a way to reinterpret, rather than replicate. During this process, I encountered Harun Farocki’s An Image. The film reveals how images are not neutral records, but carefully staged, constructed outcomes. In contrast, I began using modeling as a reverse process — not to produce an image, but to unfold the compressed behaviors and structures hidden within it.

In the second week, I broke the act of an egg-laying into three physical stages: bulging, sliding, and release. Each one was turned into a small, frozen model — a micro-sculpture holding invisible pressure and motion.

Around this time, I also drew from Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen, which critiques visibility through pixelation, compression, and resolution. Her work helped me understand that clarity isn’t always the goal. My models are messy, incomplete, and often broken. But in their imperfection, they begin to speak a different kind of spatial language — one based on absence, tension, and trace.

In Positions through Contextualising, I turned to more personal scenes. The first was a photograph of my bed. Wrinkles, dents, and scattered hair suggested past presence — not as literal evidence, but as subtle markers of where the body had been. I used modeling not to reconstruct the bed, but to trace a kind of bodily map, frozen in the fabric.

The following week, I shifted to the kitchen — a messier, more rhythmic space. I documented the aftermath of cooking: spilled oil, scattered salt, a tipped soy sauce bottle, a wiped stain. These weren’t isolated traces — they were fragments of a process. Modeling became a way to reverse-engineer a behavioral sequence: slicing, pouring, frying, wiping.

From the contact between body and surface to the logic of motion and material, I began to see modeling not just as a tool for representation, but as a method of constructing spatial narrative. It revealed a key question I’m still thinking about:

How can a model generate structures and sequences that don’t exist in the original image?

When we model from an image, what exactly are we preserving? What do we lose? And what kinds of new knowledge might be created — not by the image itself, but by modeling as a way of thinking?

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Thanks for watching~

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