LEAP

(2021-2024)

Once I had found the EDGES, I began to LEAP.

At these digital boundaries, I turned the camera on myself, capturing my avatar staring into or suspended over the digital void. This ritual, repeated thousands of times across diverse environments, became an exploration of the unseen, the unintended, the unrendered. Each leap revealed the unique physics of the world as avatars crumpled into strange shapes or took on predictable poses of flailing or flying.

The avatar, poised at the edge of rendered space, becomes a metaphor for humanity's constant push against the boundaries of the known. The image of the digital twin set against vast, often abstract digital landscapes evokes the aesthetic of the sublime in Romantic painting. However, here the awe-inspiring natural vistas are replaced by the faux-limitless potential and void of digital space. A new form of the technological sublime, where the terror and beauty stem not from nature's vastness, but from the infinite emptiness of human-created digital realms.

The repeated act of leaping into the void takes on a ritual quality. This performance, enacted across multiple digital environments, becomes a means of marking and mapping digital space through bodily (avatar) action. The avatar stands in for our physical selves, yet its ability to defy real-world physics—floating and suspended in impossible voids—highlights the profound differences between physical and digital existence. This series explores what it means to have a body in spaces where the rules of the physical world no longer apply.

(an except from)

The Play’s the Thing

“An intrepid photographer, long associated with National Geographic, Huey has ventured to the far edges of various cyber and VR chat spaces, the place where the “land” falls away, and jumped. LEAP 006 (wave) (2022) is a photograph of him waving, the excitement palpable as he arrives at his first edge in Somnium, a virtual reality environment that is also the title of Johannes Kepler’s 1608 science fiction novel about looking at the Earth from the moon. In a humorous over-identification with the tools of his trade, for LEAP 320 (test island 1), Huey transformed his avatar into an 8×10 plate camera for a head with tripod legs and arms. The blue toned landscape and violet foliage, along with the high angle capture of his presence on a sharp corner overlooking a gray void, forecasts the failed attempt that subtitles LEAP 423 (failed attempt) (2022); an invisible wall blocks him in the multiplayer online virtual world, Second Life. “

(continued below)

“The playfulness in Huey’s photographic project belies the significance of what he captures about the systems design of these virtual realities. What do we see where no one is expected to go? What limitations? What creative surprise? In the video, LEAP 656 (infinite hole, time suspended) (2023) Huey peers into a black hole that becomes a never ending well, the walls sparkling, reflecting his transformation into something luminescent. Carse writes, “Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities… Who lives horizontally is never somewhere, but always in passage.”

Mechanical LEAP 001 (dump truck monster) (2023)

60 second clip from LEAP 270 (infinite fall/amniotic fluid) (2022) 4 min 28 sec

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EDGE STUDIES

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