04302011 is a five minute, 40 second video of 38 New Yorkers who visited the artist's studio during a Museum of Arts and Design Open Studio residency, to have their portrait made in 3D. The result is an identity parade of textured 3D scans of their faces, rotating in and out of the light. The glitchy, fragmented look of these scans  results from the misuse of the high-end 3Dd laser scanner, which was never designed to capture the body. When faced with breath and movement it breaks down, generating conflicting and overlapping spatial coordinates. Subjects must close their eyes to protect themselves from the laser beam, and this generates other referents too: their serene expressions evoke memorial portraiture, and together the display could be seen as a kind of gallery of the dead. Playing on the sci-fi trope of rotating 3D images of the citizenry on large screens, this work was originally designed for display on the Big Screen Plaza on 28th Street in New York City.

(Image: Sophie Kahn. 04302011)