Revealing Rendering
Revealing Rendering?
A mixed-reality film that accuses the outsourcing of our vision to rendering machines, while demonstrating how film language can become the language of technology.
The project investigates how visual media culture and imaging technologies have evolved through intertwined forces of dreams, desire, and militaristic goals.
Rendering
Before introducing the work, I want to start with the etymology of the word rendering. Re — back. Dare — to give. To render means to give back. But embedded in that same word is another meaning: to yield, to surrender, to give something up. So when we render an image, we are simultaneously receiving.. and giving something up.
Viewport - Modes
In digital imaging tools, there is always a setting called render modes — a decision about how to give back. Wireframe mode shows only the skeleton, the bare structure. Solid mode adds skin. Environment mode adds light, texture, shadow — the full illusion of the real.
These modes aren't just software settings. They are epistemological positions. They determine what counts as visible, what counts as real.
Revealing Rendering asks.. what if we are already living inside a render mode. One shaped by military simulation, autonomous vehicles, and surveillance imaging..
As we develop our worldview through a given rendering system, we are outsourcing our vision. The driving forces behind that system are not neutral: dreams, desire, and militaristic goals have co-authored the way we see.
Semiconductors, Cameras, Sensors, and the new Mirrors
And this is not merely conceptual. Consider three quiet replacements that have already happened. Mirrors replaced by screens — like the rear-view camera. Cameras replaced by sensors — like semiconductors converting light photons into electrons. Images becoming operational — functional, made to act. Harun Farocki called this the operational image: an image intervening the reality.
Imaging Technologies from Military and Autonomous Vehicle
The work draws imaging technologies from autonomous vehicles and military simulation — industries that needed machines to see, to navigate, to target — and traces how those technologies have leaked into media culture, quietly reshaping how we see.
Avantgarde Film language as Technology langauge
Thankfully, some pioneering avant-garde filmmakers already grappled with functional images and the way to spatialize it (mentally) — and what they could demand of our rendering machines. This project situates immersive media within that lineage, particularly the feminist avant-garde filmmakers who subverted the frame, made the gaze a political act, and spatialized the screen.
