A Ghost That Once Looked Familiar and Homey

A three-dimensional model built by the method of photogrammetry, using as sources only “found footage” – photographs taken in uncontrolled conditions by a large group of different people with no connection to each other, all depicting a common object of interest: a public monument. In order to render the volume of a 3D model in photogrammetry the source photos should cover the entire 360 degrees perimeter of the monument. In uncontrolled conditions however it is next to impossible to reach such coverage. So the final 3D model would be inevitably imperfect.

The object of interest is the no longer existing public monument to 1300 Years of the Bulgarian state that was located in the centre of Sofia, built in 1981. In 2017 the monument was demolished due to its deterioration caused by long years of negligence, combined with the currently prevailing negative sentiments towards the recent past of the Communist rule.

As I initialy predicted, relying only on casual photos taken by passers-by or professional photographers in the 1980s resulted in models that are partial (full of blanks on the spots that no camera was able to reach) and deformed (in the areas where the software was incapable of interpreting data correctly on the Cartesian plane). It became a volumetric visual expression of public memory.