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Interact with Coco Rocha's 1,000 Poses in 360 Degrees

Photographer Steven Sebring turns photo book 'Study of Pose' into an interactive app, a video installation, and a limited edition series of 3D-printed figurines.
A 3D-printed figure of Coco Rocha next to one of Sebring's portraits. Images courtesy the artist, via 

Photographer Steven Sebring is no stranger to the creation of dynamic images made using modern technology. Over the last several years, he's played around with the digital delivery of his art, transforming two major works, the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life, and South Dakota photo series Bygone Days, into iPad apps to create virtual art exhibits. For his latest project, a photo book entitled Study of Pose: 1000 Poses by Coco Rocha (from Harper Design) Sebring has created an interactive app, a video installation, and a limited edition series of 3D-printed figurines.

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The photographer recently gave The Creators Project a preview of the project's accompanying Study of Pose exhibition, which opens to the public tonight at Milk Gallery. It's the fruit of Sebring's experimentations with cutting edge 360-degree camera system, “The Rig,” which he described as just 100 “shit Canon Rebels” daisy-chained together shooting sequentially in a circle at high velocity.

It looks a bit like the “bullet time” scenes in The Matrix, but without the VFX trickery. For Study of Pose, Sebring's system took 360-degree photographs of model Coco Rocha—the so-called “Queen of the Pose”—assuming 1,000 unique poses from 100 different angles. All told, Sebring's project yielded 100,000 unique images of the shape-shifting Rocha.

“It doesn't matter what I'm using,” Sebring told The Creators Project of the cheap cameras that comprise The Rig. “I just want the result.” And the result here, despite the combination of hardware and software behind it, is something simple, minimal, and even classical with its black-and-white aesthetic. It doesn't hurt that in addition to the trippy tech at play, Rocha's elaborate pantomimes look like an experimental combination of theater and ballet.

A portrait from the Study of Pose series

The exhibition exploits the three-dimensionality of Sebring's images in a number of ways: it features a table of iPads running an interactive Study of Pose iOS app, a floor-to-ceiling television screen installation of Rocha rotating in an endless pose, hundreds of tiny 3D-printed figurines of Rocha's poses—created in collaboration with Shapeways—and a series of Study of Pose-inspired artworks by Sebring's contemporaries

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Unlike the book, which is static by nature, Sebring's interactive app offers viewers the full perspective—360 degrees of the 1,000 poses. By touching a smartphone or tablet screen, users can rotate the virtual Rocha around in 360 degrees. The app also allows users to pan Rocha left and right, zoom in and out on her form, or to just let the pose's rotation play out. For those who can't make the exhibit or buy the book, the app is the next best way to experience Study of Pose.

As for the 3D-printed Rocha figurines, Sebring said this was made possible by the sheer amount of information collected by the cameras. While The Rig isn't actually a 3D scanner, it functions much like one, allowing Sebring's team to take 360 degrees' worth of Rocha data and transform it into printable 3D models. While they might look like cute art objects, they're really the physical artifacts of Sebring's interest in techno-infused art.

Conceptually, Sebring pulled references from a range of influences in the worlds of art history, film, dance, fashion and beyond. In addition to being inspired by Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneer in photographic motion studies, Sebring asked Rocha to evoke such disparate artists as Sandro Boticelli—the painter of The Birth of Venus—and Michael Jackson. Other pieces were inspired by Canadian graffiti artists Stikki Peaches and famed fashion illustrator David Downton.

“When Coco poses, there is a story being told with every gesture,” Sebring wrote of Study of Pose. “To me, that’s story telling at its most basic and beautiful. We covered all the classic poses from art history, and then moved into iconic poses from fashion and film. We also covered all manners of dance movement, from ballet to Elvis and everything in between.”

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But it wouldn't be accurate to describe Story of Pose as simply the sum of the influences that inform the poses. This becomes apparent while thumbing through the pages of the book and mobile app; though Sebring is open and enthusiastic about his technical processes, the 100,000 unique images of the 1,000 poses, with Rocha's luminous white figure often suspended in a black void, are original documents of something that seems alien and otherworldly in the same way that motion pictures must have felt to their first audiences.

Sebring has distilled this sense of wonder down into the app, which could very well influence a number of other future projects like it. Sebring is convinced others will give the system a shot, but it's anyone's guess where the concept will go next.

In the near future, however, Sebring plans to build an entire facility dedicated to 360-degree photography. When previewing Study of Pose, he pointed to a 3D print of the planned facility, which from the outside looks a bit like the Shakespearean Globe Theatre. He wouldn't say exactly how it would differ from his current 360-degree camera setup, but whatever it ends up being, it might well be just as mind-bending.

Study of Pose is available now from Harper Design. The exhibition opens tonight at Milk Gallery and will be on display through December 21.

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