Remote Sensing

ExpandFavorite

TitleRemote Sensing

Artist Suzanne Anker (American, b. 1946)

Date2013–2018

MediumPlaster, pigment, resin, glass Petri dish

DimensionsOverall: 4 x 4 x 2 in.

SubmissionNA diploma presentation, August 18, 2021

Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Gift of Frank Gillette

Object number2021.6

Label TextSuzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences, and is a key figure in the Bio Art movement. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights.

For Remote Sensing she creates a series of rapid prototype sculptures made with new digital satellite technology that can picture places that are either too toxic or inaccessible to visit. She scans her Vanitas photos to make 3D extrusions in plaster, resin and colored pigment resulting in sculptural petri-dish prints that look like crystalline landscapes.

As the artist stated:

My sculptural series Remote Sensing refers to new digital technologies that can picture places that are either too toxic or inaccessible to visit. Using state-of-the-art satellite data, remote sensing apparatuses are employed to computationally create images of such spaces. As an extension of digital photography, these images garner information electronically in order to bypass onsite investigations. The fabrication of my Remote Sensing (2015-2017) series begins with two-dimensional digital photographs, which are converted into three-dimensional virtual models using a technique called displacement mapping. The resulting files are employed to fabricate physical objects using a 3-D printer. The software program determines the deposition of variegated color applied to the structure as it is being printed, one layer at a time. Dark areas are extruded less than bright colors, keeping in tune with the ways in which pictorial spaces are perceived.

These micro-landscapes offer the viewer a top-down topographic experience assembled by zeros and ones. In these rapid prototyped sculptures, forms become numbers, and numbers become form. Such computational methods of image-making are not merely technical exercises. They forge alternative ways in which opticality can be expanded. The software program is an alternative eye. Akin to early forays into the instrumentalized techniques of the microscope, 3-D scanning devices register topography. In my work, I transfer such a technique to object-making. The data generated in these objects come from still-life sources that I set up in my studio. The components range from flowers to vegetables to geological specimens, creating a mix and match between organic and inorganic aspects of the world around us in its variegated hues and unique natural formations. Each configuration of these works takes the geometry of a circle, inspired by Jules Petri’s glassware dish, and crosses the divide between the disciplines of art and science.

Collections