art
Concealed Topographies Chirag Jindal AUCKLAND SITS ON AN ACTIVE VOLCANIC FIELD; ANCIENT NETWORKS HAVE BEEN FORMED BY LAVA. JINDAL'S IMAGES EXAMINE THESE HIDDEN LANDSCAPES AND CAVES.
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) or 3D laser scanning, church in downtown Auckland. The School of Architecture was conceived in the 1960s for high-resolution topography had just acquired an old LiDAR scanner from the Department mapping. The involves firing pulses of laser light at a sur- of Anthropology, and wanted to test out a new approach to face, some at up to two million pulses per second. A sensor document the city’s heritage. I remember being captivated measures the amount of time it takes for each pulse to echo by the process, seeing the rooms – walls, floors, ornaments, back, creating a virtual “point” accurate to less than 1mm. By paintings, textures – digitised in detail into RGB and XYZ repeating this process in quick succession, the instrument points. Through the lens of the scanner, the world was rebuilds up a “point cloud” – a precise, digital replica of reality. duced to Cartesian coordinates, visualised in a three-dimenChirag Jindal (b. 1993) is an artist and surveyor working at sional space. It offered novel readings of space; to look back the intersection of documentary journalism, new media art from impossible angles, through walls and surfaces, and flatand contemporary cartography. Jindal began exploring the ten entire spaces into a single collapsed image. When the role of terrestrial LiDAR as an emerging medium for pho- project was completed, I had some free reign to experiment tographic documentation, after graduating with a Master’s further – mapping objects, buildings and landscapes that I Degree in Architecture in 2016. Into the Underworld / Ngā found interesting. Back then, the instruments weighed over Mahi Rarowhenua, employs this technique to document 15kg and needed a main power source, so it was laborious to hidden lava caves under the city of Auckland. The caves set up and (funnily) limited by the longest extension cord I are unique to the volcanic region and are considered wāhi could afford. There weren't many resources to train from, so tapu (sacred) to local Māori groups. Jindal's practice focuses there were a few long days and nights researching and selfon humanity's relationship to marginalised landscapes, ex- learning. That was almost six years ago, and the technology ploring heritage, narrative and collective memory through has already come a long way since those early experiences. mapping and archiving. This ongoing series has won multiple awards, including the 2020 Royal Photographic Society A: What are the practical uses of this equipment, and how Under 30s Award and the Bialystok Interphoto Grand Prix. have these changed over the years? Jindal was also longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2020. CJ: One of the first recorded uses was in 1971 during the Apollo 17 mission, where LiDAR was used to map the surA: How did you come across LiDAR technology, and face of the moon. Since then, its development really has been driven by the need to quantify space and represent it when did you begin learning how to use it? CJ: In our final thesis year, there was a call for students to get digitally, beginning with large-scale topographical mapping involved in a summer project to “scan” a historic neo-gothic from the air, to detailed land and building surveys from the
24 Aesthetica
