Artist Statement

History no longer seems to unfold. It scrolls. Our understanding of the world is increasingly assembled from an endless stream of visuals that dissolve almost as quickly as they appear, leaving little opportunity to reflect on their significance, context, or complexity. Flashing videos of war, climate disasters, political unrest, and social upheaval race across our screens in the relentless churn of the news cycle, creating a collective numbness and flattened understanding.

Covering these events firsthand as a visual journalist, I became increasingly troubled by the growing gap between consuming information and comprehending it. Mediated content allows us to witness significant events, but rarely to explore them with analytical or emotional depth. What if audiences could explore not only visual documentation of defining events of our time, but also the physical evidence they leave behind, similar to ancient artifacts in a museum? Could encountering tangible remnants of these moments and their human consequences in the same space as the viewer create a deeper form of shared memory?

Until recently, the physical evidence of history could only be rescued by storing the object itself. Today, new technologies allow us to preserve places and artifacts digitally with extraordinary fidelity. Over the last five years, I documented places across the United States, transformed by climate disasters, political unrest, social movements, and cultural change using 3D scanning. These scans became an expanding collection of contemporary American history: fragments of homes destroyed by wildfire, monuments marked by protest, abandoned objects in the wake of a political rally, and landscapes forever altered by nature.

Yet while the technology to capture the world has evolved, the ways we view this material has lagged behind. My 3D archive was only viewable on flat screens or through cumbersome headsets, disconnected from the physical presence that made these places meaningful in the first place. Increasingly, I found myself asking, how could audiences meaningfully experience them?

Through Cornell Tech's Backslash program, I worked with an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students to rethink how this archive could be presented. Rather than presenting isolated digital models in a headset, we imagined an archaeological landscape populated by tangible sculptures that would be activated through Mixed Reality. This became the first prototype of The Valley of Ashes: Archaeology of the American Psyche, a hybrid installation where physical sculpture and digital media function as a single experience.

Realizing this vision required solving a series of artistic and technical challenges. Large photogrammetry models preserve extraordinary visual detail, but are computationally demanding, making it difficult to present multiple artifacts together in a shared immersive environment. Working with Nayoung Kim (MPS Information Science) from Cornell's Virtual Embodiment Lab, we developed optimization workflows through extensive experimentation that balanced fidelity, performance, and scale, allowing visitors to move through an interconnected landscape.

At the same time, I began reversing my own documentary process. Instead of strictly working with 3D scanned objects in digital space, I was curious about returning artifacts to the physical world. Working with Niti Parikh and Sebastian Bidegain at Cornell Tech's MakerLAB, I developed a fabrication pipeline using 3D model preparation, SLA printing, silicone mold making, and concrete casting to transform ephemeral scans into tactile sculptures. 3D models that had existed only on a hard drive for years became physical objects that audiences could once again walk among, inspect, and interrogate.

The installation brought together a time capsule of recent American history: Confederate monuments reclaimed in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, McMansions charred in the Los Angeles fires, and a Cybertruck painted outside Trump Tower on Election Day. Individually, each object was shaped by social or natural forces; collectively, they formed a portrait of a country on its 250th anniversary, wrestling with inequality, political polarization, technological alienation, climate change, social fragmentation, and the erosion of the American dream.

Working with Diyu Zhou (Design Tech), we investigated ways of embedding the original photogrammetric textures into the sculptures through carved relief, preserving surface information often lost in translation between digital and physical media. Instructor William Leon developed the Mixed Reality experience that precisely aligned the original digital models and their photorealistic textures with the cast sculptures, allowing physical and virtual surfaces to converge into a unified immersive installation.

Viewers move through this living archive as if on an excavation site. As they approach each sculpture, its photorealistic texture emerges through a Mixed Reality headset. By isolating surreal fossils of our present, viewers can reflect on the fragility of our civilization in the hopes of repairing it and reshaping its future.

This project has fundamentally reshaped my practice. I no longer see digitally preserved relics as documentary endpoints, but as the starting point for a sculptural process that moves fluidly between digital and physical space. In an age of information overload, The Valley of Ashes has become an ongoing experiment in how documentary, sculpture, and spatial media can converge to create new forms of collective reflection, slowing the present down long enough for us to inhabit it.

Collaborator Statement - Bil Leon

Working with Backslash is always a fantastic departure from the traditional teaching and research projects I get into. There is something very compelling about subjects that span both space and time. Getting to see Niko's work reproject and recontextualize ephemeral events was a highlight.

Our collaboration was highly experimental from the start, something needed when taking such unique assets and passing them through multiple mediums and filters; from 3D models, to AR tracking of images, and full VR overlays. It was a joy to see the work come together for the Open Studio gallery and the wow moment of seeing the cybertruck model, fully in stone, permanently etched brought into focus the power of permanent records and seeing the full loop needed to bring more of these items into existence.

From a technical perspective this project brought to light the need for making computing and high tech fab resources available for artists. We were pushing against the limits of compute from the beginning - giant file sizes, highly detailed models, and different manipulation stages for different devices. A core piece of the collaboration being the need to pass data and changes back and forth while keeping authorial consistency in different mediums.

The level of openness, the eagerness to engage with abstract ideas, and the respect shown to such delicate subjects among the group was remarkable. I look forward to where this work goes and grows.

Collaborator Statement - Nayoung Kim

We remember things the way pieces of a puzzle come back to us, not the way they actually happened. The feeling stays, but the exact shape of the moment doesn't. Maybe that's part of why art that leans into nostalgia gets people so easily. It's not showing us the past, it's showing us the gap between what we lived through and what we kept.

Valley of Ashes started from Niko's scans, real objects from real disasters and unrest, pulled straight off the street or out of a wrecked space. The piece does two things with them at once. As sculptures, they're modern fossils, just sitting there, evidence of something that already happened. But put on the headset and the same object starts moving, gets textured and animated over time, and turns into something more speculative, not proof anymore, more like a guess at what could happen next. You're supposed to walk through it like an archaeological dig, except the ruins aren't old. They're still forming.

My job was the part in between that nobody in the audience ever sees. I started with basically nothing to go on, no one to show me the ropes, just Reality Capture open on my screen and a scan to figure out. Some of Niko's models came in at over 150 million polygons, and I had to bring them down to something Unity could actually run without falling apart. I cleaned up his raw scans so they could survive going from scan to physical fossil to Unity to headset without turning into a mess of triangles. Reality Capture doesn't care about any of that context. It just wants to optimize a mesh, make it as efficient as possible. But "efficient" and "true to the object" aren't the same thing, and I had to keep pushing against the program's defaults to keep the details that actually mattered, even when they weren't the ones a normal optimization pass would keep. Once I actually got into it, though, I looked forward to the work. Some of those decimation passes took tens of hours on a single model, and more than once, after all that time, the process would just end in a fail message with nothing to show for it. But I didn't let that discourage me, I'd just go looking for a different approach and try again. Looking back, this might be the clearest place in my life where just sticking with something quietly, hour after hour, actually turned into something real, and I'm happy that it came through in this project specifically.

I did almost all of this from Ithaca, on my own, while William and Niko were together on Roosevelt Island at the Cornell Tech campus. Most of what I had to go on were Google Meet calls where I'd share my screen and show whatever small progress I'd made, a model a little cleaner than the week before, a texture that finally held up. Watching the work inch forward like that, call after call, was what kept me going more than anything else. It wasn't a single breakthrough moment, it was just seeing that the slow work was actually adding up to something.

I met up with Niko in person twice to grab a hard drive with the raw photos and models he'd captured. We didn't see each other often, just once a semester, but even with that little contact, being a Backslasher still felt like belonging to something. The group was close in a way that didn't seem to depend on how often you were actually in the same room.

Looking back at everything I did across undergrad and grad school at Cornell, being part of the Backslash community is still the thing I'm proudest of. Not just Valley of Ashes itself, but what it meant to be folded into that group, even from two hundred miles away.