Join artist in residence Max Colson for a workshop engaging with the potential of Lidar 3D scanning technology as a tool for story-telling and visual communication. Building on his residency research, exploring how Lidar registers London’s built environment using a hand-held scanner, Max invites participants to consider the way that Lidar technology is being used in visual communication. What are the potentials and limitations of this way of mapping and visualising the world?

We will take a look at recent key examples of Lidar being used in visual communication and consider the visual and dramatic qualities of this tool. We will look closely at how they are currently being deployed. We will ask: what are the current tropes in Lidar’s usage as a story telling device? How does this medium present the world to us? How is the medium itself being presented to us? What are the effects of this technology on the way that we understand space, time and history? What information does the scan omit and what does it reveal? How do concepts of objectivity and subjectivity relate to Lidar scanning? What other topics might this technology be used to generate discourse around?

While this workshop promises no definite conclusions to these questions, its aim is to provide an informal space to develop a critical awareness of the technology as a visual communication device.

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Max Colson is an artist and award-winning film-maker focused on the representation of urban and rural change. Recent films include the post-Brexit fantasy, The Green and Pleasant Land (2017), and the celebrated Construction Lines (2017), an animation exploring a Knightsbridge billionaire’s underground bunker. He teaches on the MA Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins.

Image Credit: The Carpenter’s Estate, Stratford (Max Colson, 2017)