“I have this desire,” says the 3D artist Quinn Carmichael, “to merge my practice with the physical world and explore sensory experiences.” In his digital videos, often paired with ethereal scores, Carmichael plunges viewers into not-quite realities: meditative dreamstates, surface studies, bucolic glimpses of paradise lost. In one clip, an organic form sprouts bubbles, which are driven by a push algorithm prohibiting the particles from touching. In another, balloon-esque forms inflate and crumple, making and unmaking themselves.
Carmichael, who grew up with an artist mother, experimented across mediums for a decade: painting, drawing, photography. (“I loved street photography, but I’m too shy of a person,” he says.) After stumbling on a projection-mapped experience in Japan in 2019, he downloaded the 3D software suite Cinema 4D and spent “every waking moment learning this software”. He credits his sister, a professional ballerina, with informing his understanding of expression through motion.
