I love virtual skin. By constantly observing it, adjusting the normal map, the diffusion of light beneath its epidermis, the ambient occlusion, the roughness, the specular mapping, and the displacement texture, I have learned to appreciate the complexity of its design, the delicacy of its patterns; the more it seems to have experienced, the more it moves me.
These images are, in a way, frames from the creation process of the protagonist in my upcoming novel. Usually, a frame is a film excerpt ; a pause in the progression of a plot. However, if one could dive into my head and photograph its contents while ideas clash, amalgamate, mutate, and disappear before reemerging in a new form, one would find a very long, incessant film, a sort of suspense, of calculation, of formulation, of question marks and countless plot twists, short-circuits and swirls where strange bodies stir.
When I started modeling the body that appears in the virtual photographs of this series, I knew that I was working from an embryonic literary idea.
I was stepping into the skin of a narrator whose entire story I had not yet grasped.
I was certain of finding myself propelled forward, into a futuristic world radically different from our own.
A kind of molting was in preparation; folds were multiplying on the top layer of her skin.
While my neurons were kneading fragments of sentences, I was sculpting a digital body for this novelistic creature who did not yet have a face. A few scenes formed the nucleus of the novel under construction. An atmosphere; a dehydrated landscape, like the skin of my narrator.
By observing these pictorial sketches, by modifying the textures, the play of light around this virtual presence, my imagination sorts and formulates the sentences to be written.
Here, an image is not worth just 1000 words: it carries the germ of a novel.
3D modeling | digital images | text : KAROLINE GEORGES