I chose Blender starting from the curiousity of 3D-to-2D outputs and how a single render can feel like a flat slice of a scene. During the copy process, I realised I was not simply reconstructing an object but reconstructing a view and system. Since the reference is a single cropped angle, most of my decisions were guesses: depth, scale, and rotation were repeatedly adjusted until they looked right from the front. Yet when I changed the viewpoint, the model often became uncanny, with floating connections and warped proportions, until lighting exposed these contradictions. This echoed my earlier observation that Blender’s XYZ views are a kind of re-planarisation: the object becomes whatever survives a chosen camera regime.
In this sense, Blender favours versionable, serviceable visibility. It produces images that can be refined, compared, and redeployed, rather than a single stable truth. My position in this process is closer to a translator or forger than an objective observer. I am not neutrally representing a real vase and flower; I am re-performing an already rendered image standard, aiming for a relative neutrality limited by my technical skill and the reference’s demands. Form becomes a communication strategy: camera, composition, lighting, and render settings organise hierarchy and mood as much as geometry does.
What counts as accurate or neutral representation in a tool built on camera, perspective, and industry defaults? Am I modelling an object, or modelling a standard of visibility, what is allowed to be seen and what can be ignored?
Berger’s Ways of Seeing provided the theoritical support. A reproduced image is mobile and recontextualised, and its meaning shifts with the maker, the viewer, and the setting (Berger, 1972). The reference image therefore carries a particular way of seeing, and my copy inevitably translates it rather than reproducing it neutrally.
Reading Jencks and Silver’s Adhocism further clarified my method. It framed my role as a bricoleur working under constraint, improvising with available tools, tutorials, and shared resources to rapidly meet a specific visual purpose (Jencks and Silver, 2013, pp. 15). Surrealism, through its fusion of common objects to create heterogeneity, has gradually been recontextualized by time and culture into an improvisational exploration of non-temporary works—a highly enlightening endeavor（Jencks and Silver, 2013, p. xix). Instead of chasing procedural correctness or a perfect system, the work progressed through purposeful trial and error,and let ad-hoc networks replace hierarchical structures to produce impromptu slices(Jencks and Silver, 2013, pp. 20). The most productive moments often came from imprecision and leftovers: mismatched joins, unstable depth, and other unseen problems became clues about how the reference’s visibility standard was constructed (Jencks and Silver, 2013, pp. 16).
Following this lens, I shifted from chasing one perfect copy to an iterative experiment. I rebuilt the same scene through contrasting modelling strategies, spatially coherent modelling versus camera-first modelling that sacrifices unseen sides. Keeping materials constant, I tested each version through small camera shifts and different viewport or render modes. These comparative slices made neutrality measurable: fidelity holds only within a chosen viewing standard, and collapses as soon as that standard changes.
Reference
Jencks, C. and Silver, N. (2013) Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (First published 1972).
Ways of Seeing (1972) Ways of Seeing. Available at: https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/ (Accessed: 28 January 2026).
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