I dream a lot now that I don’t drink alcohol. I find myself in similar scenery in most of my dreams, which are now vivid but also ephemeral. Buildings are disintegrating and run-down, tenement-style; houses have a dusty, haunted atmosphere, and generally lean like they’re about to collapse. I navigate these dissolving landscapes by climbing over fallen structures, usually with a group of people following me and expecting me to keep them alive and safe with whatever weapons I have handy. A lot of my dreams are strange and unnerving, and when I wake up, the vivid scenes flash in my mind and then dissolve like the artwork of RUBENFRO.
Ruben Frosali is a Tokyo-based real-time visual effect artist and director whose work is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced outside of my own fleeting mental imagery or dreams. He captures 3D images of people and street scenes and turns them into psychedelic and almost nightmarish dissolving video artwork. He’s done VFX for music videos for artists like Pussy Riot and A$AP Ferg, sells NFTs, and only last year did he quit his IT job to pursue his unbelievable art full-time. His work is some of the most enthralling, terrifying, most familiar, and most captivating visual art I’ve seen in a while. Check out his various works and platforms below…
In my artworks, I use raw volumetric captures from the real world instead of crafted 3D models. With the technique I developed, I can scan large urban scenes in a matter of seconds, freezing time and preserving slices of daily life. Then use the scans as building blocks of my animated artworks. I embrace the fuzzy and imprecise nature of raw untreated point cloud data, especially when 3D-capturing people. That aesthetic is closer to how we remember things, fading memories you can almost touch but disintegrate as you get too close. The ability of this technology to document reality, deconstructing it into a series of coordinates is fascinating. I see those 3D points as atoms I can fluidly re-arrange in different combinations. Often the patterns and shapes of the real world interact with the algorithms to create unexpected results. The data can be used to also generate sounds, and I usually integrate audio field recordings to compose the soundscape in my artworks.
Source: Visual Atelier 8
