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Ever wondered what you look like in miniature?
This Triennial’s exhibition at the Georges House Gallery by Strange Cargo is embracing the notion of mascots and trinkets to celebrate feeling lucky.
More than 350 individuals have been digitally scanned and reproduced in perfectly-scaled 3D model form.
Walking into the gallery to be “scanned” sounds a bit scary. But there is really no need to be – it’s not posing nude for a bloke with a camera. Not this time anyway.
Although saying that, director Brigitte Orasinski has already had requests from former participants from the Spencer Tunick exhibition to get themselves reproduced digitally in the buff.
She said: “Some of our Spencer participants have come down and they were really up for it again.”
The only thing to worry about is focusing on one spot without becoming too dizzy. And writing as a quite fidgety person, standing still for three minutes isn’t the easiest thing.
The technology is quite simply incredible. The detail each model captures is stunning including the ruffles in your clothes to the position of your fingertips.
Deta Ward, one of the brains behind developing the technology along with Chad Jackson of Digital Native Academy, explains: “It’s a laser scanner which uses infra-red which bounces back into the scanner and is processed into the computer.
“A cube has six faces but you have 200,000. This is the first place it’s been done as a piece of art.”
The scanning technology is just a couple of steps away from being digitised and adding movement to be used in virtual situations such as video games. Deta and Chad work on that too.
Some of the stories behind the people who have had the scans done already are heartwarming.
“Brigitte talked about man who came in with his blind wife, who had never been able to see and who wanted to feel what she looked like.
Brigitte adds: “We’re really excited. It’s a first for Folkestone.
“People want to record their children while they are still growing and some are simply fascinated by the process.”