The 123D Catch website promises its users that they can "Turn ordinary photos into extraordinary 3D models;" the resulting models can be shared with other users on the 123D Catch community site. In this video, which premieres on Rhizome, Clement Valla and A.E. Benenson argue that the 3D models of 123D Catch should be understood not as recreations of photographed objects but as records of machine vision:
Like the junk-piles known as middens to archaeologists, the 123D Catch site paradoxically conserves its objects at the moment of their fragmentation.
But if a midden grows out of cast-off objects, broken as they are discarded haphazardly as refuse, here the artifacts are fractured by the opposite force: not by inattention but a moment of intense technological attention.
Clement Valla's solo exhibition "Surface Survey" runs through May 10 at Transfer Gallery in Brooklyn.