Grenzgänger

The 3D scanner ‘reads’ the form of the object, heron or sphinx, and translates it into a gridded shape: an image of volume that has no depth, weight, or environment. This image appears free-floating onscreen. Looking at this bodiless index of a body, I thought of ghost nets: disused fishing gear, lost from boats, that can drift aimlessly through the ocean for decades. A ghost net is a species of non-being. It has lost its meaning and purpose, and it has literally been lost: nobody knows where it is. Nonetheless, it moves materially through the world, ensnaring fish, turtles, other plastic junk. The scanned and remodelled creatures also leave traces on the world, and the world leaves its trace on them. These traces are elusive, moving like ghost gear, like migrating birds, through the blind spots of human perception. The scans are chopped and distributed to memory chips, where they are stored in packets of information, some separated, some together. They are held on hardware made of metals, minerals, and plastics, inside a server farm beside a dam in a pine forest, or in a desert silo, or in the industrial unit at the end of the street.

– Daisy Hildyard, from Above / Below, Pink Noise, Distanz, 2025