Abstract or Keywords
Several noteworthy artworks are starting to critically and creatively engage with LIDAR technology. One example is Where the City Can’t See from 2016, said to be the first fiction film shot entirely with the LIDAR laser scanning technology. Directed by speculative architect Liam Young and written by author and journalist Tim Maughan, the short film depicts life within the near-future Chinese-controlled Detroit Economic Zone. We follow this narrative through the machinic LIDAR gaze, a three-dimensional aesthetic point cloud play of colors, shapes, dimensions, and movements infused with glitches, deflections, and disruptions. The film plays with not only the top-down logics and aesthetics of LIDAR mediality through its visual effects and story line, but also the creative bottom-up means of countering them within the film narrative, as well as in the film-maker’s own hacks of LIDAR cameras. In this chapter, we critically explore Where the City Can’t See as an artistic “anti-environment” that illuminates LIDAR technology not only as an emerging mobile media infrastructure but also a new visual aesthetic and cultural medium. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from mobile communication, media ecology, and mobilities research, we discuss how this LIDAR artwork both situates and unsettles such an emerging media environment. In doing so, our analysis also speaks to scholarship into contemporary and emerging mobile communication and mobile media art.