The human body and figure seen through an artificial filter, such as a camera lens or a scan, becomes an open image. No longer a mere portrait, but a portal that reveals the vulnerabilities, fallacies, failures and imperfections of our existence as finite beings.

A critical approach to technological tools and a gentle disobedience to the standard purpose with which they were conceived belongs to the digital artist and sculptor Sophie Kahn. The aim is not in fact, or not only, to give agency to machines, but rather to subvert their uses imposed by determined social, political, temporal circumstances by opening up the possibility of new creative discoveries, unexpected but never unintentional.

Sophie's works are the result of careful and insightful research. Through 3D modelling, a background in photography and a technical approach based on theoretical investigation, they emerge as suspended entities, silent but sentient. It is up to the observer whether the fragmentary or incomplete nature of the images created is a lack to be filled or a different conception of totality, sincere in its defects.

Would you like to introduce us to your artistic practice and specifically tell us about your activity as a sculptor in the digital realm?

I’m a digital artist and sculptor, and I’ve been working with 3d laser scanning and 3D printing since 2003. I trained as a photographer, but I hit a point of frustration with photography - it was really a frustration with my own body, both because your perspective as a photographer is limited to where you can stand, but also because in my mid-twenties I became ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, and I wasn’t able to carry my heavy camera gear or walk around all day looking for locations.

I enrolled in an architecture school in order to learn 3D modelling, and the department had a 3D laser scanner. It felt like such a natural extension of my work as a photographer. The scanner uses light and a lens, and the process of scanning someone is intimate and almost tactile, like making a portrait. It also had the same flaws as photography - a scan is made from life, in one place and time, from a limited perspective, and anything that the scanner can’t see remains as a hole in the scan - for example, if a person’s head is turned to the side, you might get a hole behind their nose and under their chin, because those parts of the face are hidden in that one view.

I loved the idea of being able to materialize these artefacts, to rotate the incomplete head scan so you can see, in the round, where the device failed, and how incomplete the mechanical perception is. But I had to wait another 5 or 6 years for the market to catch up and for 3D printing to become more accessible to end-users. Finally, around 2010, I was able to prepare my own files and 3D print my work without having to go through an institution.

Since that time I’ve created a few large, ongoing bodies for work - one, Machines for Suffering, focused on the invention of hysteria through photography at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris. I used medical drawings and diagrams from the time to choreograph dancers and performers as they enacted the poses that were supposedly typical of an attack of hysteria. I also worked with Butoh performers during a residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and most recently am working on a series of life-sized, 3D printed portrait sculptures that address bodily vulnerability and transformation. Since the pandemic began I’ve been looking at ways to show my work without physical space and have created a number of VR and AR artworks.

Where did your interest in the body first originate, and how is the virtual dimension moulding the very concept of corporeality, in your opinion?

The first scans I did were of my own body, and I never get tired of the way the scanner ‘sees’ the human figure. The damage that the scanner does to its subject feels so much more poignant when it’s a damaged, life-sized human face or body that the viewer stands before - it feels much more personal than, say, a damaged coffee cup. Our brains are so hyper-attuned to the face, in particular, that any small irregularity in facial features registers with the viewer on a much deeper level.

There’s no question that new technologies have changed the way we perceive our bodies, both online and offline. We’re so used to seeing bodies that are digitally altered and mediated, that people are even undergoing cosmetic surgery to get our bodies to match these impossible digital versions that software allows us to create. Technology also allows us to see in and through the body, of course, although again, it fragments and decontextualizes the body as it does so.

You say that your work addresses technology’s failure. Could you please elaborate on this topic and share what intrigues you most about such a concept?

The 3D laser scanner I use was never designed to capture people - when confronted with breath and motion it breaks down, generating fragmentary and overlapping results. I use it ‘against the grain’, in a way it was never designed to be used. I think that this is a critical tool for artists who want to work thoughtfully with technology. Every piece of technology we use was designed by a person, and that person had a limited perspective and carried the biases of their time and place - look at the ways that color film was designed to expose for lighter skin tones, for example. Thinking about bias in social media, or in AI and machine learning, is vital as well. So I think that even if my work isn’t explicitly about these blind spots in design, it’s still important for me to be subtly subversive in mis-using tools to creative ends. I can’t stand digital art that could be a demo or an advertisement for software the artist used to make it.

The idea of fragmentation and instability seems to be a constant in your creations. What is the potential of this rendering?

I think that having an early experience of chronic illness and disability gave me a glimpse into the ways that the body can fail - one that some people are fortunate not to receive until they are much older. Image-making can sometimes be non-consensual or even violent so a device that fragments the body while it captures it seems very apt. And my sculpture very literally deals with instability - with digital bodies that don’t obey the laws of gravity, or 3D printed physical sculptures that are held up with complex lattices of support structures (because they could never stand on their own). Considering how a digital artefact enters the world, and how it must contend with material existence, is also a critical question for me as a sculptor.

Your research focuses primarily on the female figure. What is the driving force behind this inclination and choice?

I’ve always felt that positionality is important, and I’m making work from my own experience as the owner of a body that was assigned female at birth. In my photography studies I was always drawn to portraiture and especially to feminist self-portraiture that looked at the power dynamics involved in the gaze. That said, I’ve worked with plenty of models of all genders - none of the areas I researched are exclusive to women (soldiers who developed PTSD from WWI were also labeled hysterics, for example.)

I got sick of making self-portraits and thrived on the energy that performers brought to my work, which made the pandemic really hard, because there’s no way to scan in a socially distant manner. I’m looking forward to working with models again, now that we have vaccines and now that I finally have semi-reliable childcare!

How do you think the human and the non-human come into communication both in your work and everyday life?

I’m writing this surrounded by machines and microprocessors - I have a home workshop with three 3D printers, for example. I’m hesitant to use the word collaboration, but there’s a resistance or a level of surprise that happens when working with technology that often leads to unexpected results. I’m never fully in control of the appearance of a scan, and it brings back the magic of watching a photographic print in the developing tray. But I wouldn’t call my work generative, at all. I’m working more like a photographer - making 20 or 30 scans, choosing one, then sculpting and editing it heavily before I render or print the file. There’s always a human eye and brain behind these decisions, even ones that seem to be made by machines (a human designed that machine!) and I’m sceptical of generative art that tries to absent the human from the decision-making process...