22 Dec The Idea and Concept behind “CUBES III”
CUBES III: The final chapter
It has now been six years since I started my “CUBES” series. A conceptual photo series in which I bring human micro- and macrocosms to life with the help of miniature sets. Created as three sub-series with nine motifs each, it is now time to explain the last chapter, CUBES III, which I started in December 2023, in more detail.
Set in a fictional surrounding – a rotating space station called “Helios-9” – CUBES III investigates the relationship between technology and the human being. Within nine interconnected rooms, the series also serves as a playground to incorporate artificial intelligence into the creative process, thus reflecting upon fundamental questions of our current and future times:
Who is the creator? Does man inspire machine or vice versa? And where are we going with all these powerful technological possibilities in the long run?
Conceptual Ideas
Similar to CUBES I and CUBES II, all nine rooms of CUBES III are connected to one another. While in the first two chapters the nine rooms were each arranged in a 3 by 3 matrix, in CUBES III the sets are located in a ring of eight rooms positioned around a central CUBE. The following graphic visualizes the position of the rooms in this fictitious Wheel Space Station:
One of the central themes of CUBES III – artificial intelligence – is being explored and reflected in different ways within the series, especially by creating sceneries that allude to the possibilities and risks of this technology. Furthermore, AI is also integrated into the artistic process in various ways, for instance when creating the badges for the protagonists’ spacesuits:
By the time of writing this article, five of nine images have already been finished. You can find them here. And as always, if you want to learn more about the construction of each set, make sure to also watch my Making-Of-Videos.