Depth Sensing Failure, 2025
Extruded aluminum, concrete, grass, archival inkjet photographs, grass, single channel video RT 05:32
Depth Sensing Failure takes its title from a recurring error in 3D scanning technology—a breakdown in which the system cannot accurately perceive depth, consequently producing dead zones, gaps, and misaligned surfaces. I encountered this failure repeatedly while attempting to 3D scan trash: vibrantly colored mesh produce bags, chunks of styrofoam, tangles of obsolete USB cords. Objects designed to persist proved resistant to being fully seen or resolved. The more I tried to capture the weight, volume, and accumulation of these forever plastics, the more the scans collapsed into confusion.
This inability to see, understand, or cope with these materials became a poetic witness to our current condition. The resulting video embedded within the installation shows these failed scans—flickering, unstable, partially legible forms that hover between presence and erasure. They appear as ghosts of objects that refuse disappearance, mirroring our human imprint as something continually bound to the materials we produce but cannot undo.
The provisional framework of the installation hints at other haunting horizons: reappropriated landscape imagery from the history of American landscape photography, representational images of industrial material, and living grass that withers within its narrow enclosure. Nature exists as both physical presence and cultural simulation; technology falters in its attempt to comprehend matter, and waste persists as an unresolved form.
