Film and the art of scanner imaging
What is it about?
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology. It needs no ambient light, nor the guidance of the human eye to capture and reproduce a likeness of the world around us. Given the breadth of its potential uses, LiDAR generates a constant stream of technical literature. In this article however, scanner imaging is envisaged not merely for its functional capacities, but also for its aesthetic and expressive value. This article focuses in particular on Anouk De Clerk’s film Thing (2013), a work entirely comprised of LiDAR images.
Why is it important?
The article adresses the question of the growing ascendancy of the ‘technical’, or the displacement of the human by automatic operations that supplement human choices in the recording and production of images. It does so by focusing on the formal and poetic dimensions of scanner imaging, including the sense of becoming produced by ephemeral pixels clouds formations.