"Dream of Dreaming Boy" is a reconstruction of the statue Saint Tarcisius (c.a. 1880) by Alexandre Falguière. I created it with the creative misuse of photogrammetry and AI image upscaling technology at a time in which artwork in museums was inaccessible due to the pandemic. The photogrammetry was produced on a prior trip to The Met museum in New York City as an exploration of how 3D scans can fail in poetic ways.
The broken geometry and fragments produced by a photogrammetry scan done covertly, in imperfect lighting, seemed eerily resonant to this particular statue in which Saint Tarcisius was stoned to death for protecting a Blessed Sacrament concealed in his hands. During the pandemic I rendered the scan in 3D software and found I was unable to recover the lower half of the statue.
At the time, I was also recovering from COVID-19 and experiencing brain fog and I found I was not even able to remember the name of the statue. I had developed a technique for misusing AI image upscaling technology in which I upscaled lower resolution versions of the original image to produce colorful, abstract renderings of the artwork characterized by glowing, orb-like pixels. I collaged these together to produce the final image which to me feels like a memory of the original statue, slowly being forgotten, yet eternally radiant and beautiful.
