Merch Mulch: Dead Mall 360 Video Recomposition

Vimeo Link: (https://vimeo.com/22053334)

Merch Mulch (2017)
360 Video - Click and Drag to Rotate
Music by R. Luke Dubois.

A three-dimensional photogrammetric amalgamation of abandoned shopping malls, digitally reconstructed from youtube videos taken prior to the sites’ destruction.

Thanks to the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry for supporting this project.

“In her 360° video work Merch Mulch, Claire Hentschker appropriates and reassembles YouTube footage of American shopping malls that were eventually demolished. Through photogrammetry – a technique that turns photographic images of an object or space into 3D models – these images become a digital assemblage of fragments, incomplete memories of these social, economic and cultural spaces. Through this process the artist leads the viewer into haunting surreal architectures where missing data and glitched out mappings allow for the reconstruction of a past, questioning photorealism and allegedly scientific objectivity of photography and 3D models. Merch Mulch challenges the very notion of representation and the real, now distorted and fragmented, and presents an amalgamation of shared memories stitched into a three-dimensional dream.” - Marco De Mutiis