I work with what the scan cannot hold.
I use phone LiDAR, photogrammetry and point clouds to record popular festivals, terreiros, plaster saints and moving bodies. What comes back is never a copy: it is a punctured, noisy cloud, missing precisely the part that mattered. I call this method smartography — and the remains it leaves behind, rastilhos (fuse-trails).
3D capture was built in the Global North to inventory the world with precision. Aimed at a procession or a samba school drum section, it fails. That failure is not a technical defect to be corrected: it is the subject. It is where popular culture escapes the inventory — and where the work begins.
bio
Will Figueiredo (Novo Hamburgo, Brazil) is a visual artist and researcher. He holds an MFA in Visual Poetics from UFRGS, is a researcher at OM-LAB/CNPq, and won the 1st Digital Art Prize at the Universidad de Sevilla (Spain). His practice weaves 3D capture technologies, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cosmologies, and decolonial thought. He lives and works between Novo Hamburgo and São Paulo, Brazil.