Sensing is believing, believing is seeing

Sensing is believing, believing is seeing is a series of photographic works which utilise remote sensing techniques, namely photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning (a 3D scanning process of objects). While not strictly photography, 3D scanning has the same principles and ambitions of “reality capture” as traditional photography, but within a three-dimensional digital framework.

A recurring theme in the images are gateways, imagined or suggested. A focus of Archontides’ recent research has been portal fantasies in imaginative fiction, with portals being liminal structures that the hero travels through, leaving one’s world behind for unknown places. While escapism from reality brings with it a series of negative connotations from a Freudian and Marxist perspective, when viewed from a literary standpoint, it allows one to view imaginary worlds as spaces that offer new perspectives (and perhaps even solutions) to ongoing issues.

The elements of the images come from Archontides’ archive—an archive for which the artist has been systematically documenting his surroundings. Through a method similar to collage, he composes these virtual worlds. Virtual worlds occupy a strange ontological status located in the liminal space between the actual and imaginary—they are visible and appear to be material, yet their materiality is merely an illusion, requiring a leap of faith on the viewer’s part in order to become fully actualised. Through this process, the works negotiate both the process as a medium for photography, but also the Cypriot landscape as a place that remains in many ways virtual.